Family Diary and Roundup January 2024

Family Diary

This January has been a strange one. I remember last January ( read our Jan 2023 roundup here) as a busy month – work-wise and family-wise. But this one has been very slow. As I’m finishing up my income/expenses for the month, it’s been the quietest work-wise for years. Even lockdown COVID times were busier! I keep questioning myself what have I done for my work to fall off a cliff? With the cost of living sky-high, money doesn’t go as far as it used to. I’m guessing this is the same for marketing budgets etc as well. Anyhow we are nearly out of January and into a brand new month – with an extra day! Here is our family diary and roundup January 2024.

Thing’s We’ve Looked at and Tried

TheraTears® Dry Or Tired Overnight Restore Eye Drops

AD-Gifted sample | Little Dottie wakes up throughout the night frequently during the week, so I suffer from tired gritty eyes. Plus working at a screen during the day doesn’t help! I was kindly sent some TheraTears® Dry Or Tired Overnight Restore Eye Drops to help. I must say they are extremely refreshing to the eye. They take away the soreness and by the morning they are much better.

I can highly recommend it for tired busy mums! or dads!

TheraTears® Dry Or Tired Overnight Restore Eye Drops

Using advanced cross-linked hyaluronic acid technology, they repair, restore and protect your eye’s surface while you sleep. TheraTears® Dry Or Tired Overnight Restore eye drops work through the night to restore any lost moisture to your eyes.

With this one-stop drop, you can start each day feeling bright-eyed and bushy-tailed!

Available in Boots, £10.99

Family

My birthday! Yes, I’m a January baby – 2 weeks after Christmas to be exact! The trouble with a birthday this close to after Christmas, is people tend to forget it!! For this birthday I treated myself to a trip to Waterstones. My favourite place! They have a cute cafe with cinnamon buns to die for!

The girls settled back into school after Christmas brilliantly. Little Dottie moved into a different classroom and loves it! She’s not good with change but was fine with this huge one! We have also had her Autism Assessment parent forms through so that’s a huge step into her getting her diagnosis. We’ve been waiting for years!

As the girls are getting older, I don’t feature them as much on the blog and social media. We seem to be drifting away from the many toy reviews we did a few years back. I’m OK with that, it’s their choice.

We had one snow shower – yeah not quite a snow day!

Work

OK, so I touched on how crazily dead the blogging world seems at the moment. A few things I’ve done this month to maintain my blog and keep me busy are:

Contacted my amazing hosts to see if they can help me speed up my site. Yes, they have done some tweaking for me. I hope you are finding it faster!

Broken backlinks – the pain of every blogger. At the start of January, I had 185. The latest count is 99. So that’s a huge step in removing them!

Improve and update posts – I have over 4000 blog posts! Yes, but I have been blogging for nearly 9 years now! EEK where has that time gone? I have focused on a couple of blog posts which were the biggest traffic driver to my site. Google did some silly update in the Autumn and it wiped my traffic to less than half!

TikTok – There is a story behind this! So last Spring I lost access to my account as I couldn’t remember my password and the contact thing was going around in circles. So I cut my losses and left. Fast forward to January 2024 and I’m noticing more brands asking for TikTok coverage and so I decided to give it another go! Lucky for me no one had taken my old username so I got it back! I’m @rachbustin if you want to come over and follow me!

Pinterest – Google is pants lately with all these updates so I’ve been investing some time back into Pinterest. It’s especially good for my horse names posts over on my other site!

Other sites – I have a few other blogs that I work on now and again. I should be more organised and spend a regular amount of time on them, but time is always my enemy! I work like a 40 hour week in school hours so I struggle to find more time. However, I have found a good niche that I’m enjoying making content for on my home site. The traffic is increasing on that one, so Google must like it!!