Madayaw!

In English, that means 'Welcome!' :) And in Filipino / Tagalog, it's the popular greeting, 'Mabuhay!' ♥

So here I am, blogging again after a self-imposed hiatus of four years or so. That's also the age of my eldest kid. And with that, you can surmise two things-- one, having kids / parenting and blogging doesn't jive with me; and two, I have more than one kid. But thank god, I 'only' have two! Who will be hereby known as The Eldest and The Youngest. Creative, I know. Haha! Sorry, my creative juices are still dry.

TE and TY meet Diane, the baby Triceratops in Universal Studios SG.

So, blogging hiatus of 4 years. Did my brain cells die? Nahh, coz that didn't mean I stopped writing or engaging my intellectual faculties. Blogging isn't synonymous to writing you know. Anyway, for the latter, Google+ was (and still is) my source since it launched in 2011. I'm quite active there and you can visit me at http://google.com/+MelissaSolito ♥ I have nearly 6500 followers from all over the world (not PH or FB friends, lol) and more than 1.5 million views there. And that's because I post good content!

Which brings us to the next topic: where did I write during my blogging hiatus? Two words: social networks! You already know about Google+, and the other one is Instagram (you know, where the Millenials post their selfies 100x a day, lolol). But yes, IG. A lil back story here. You see I'm the memorykeeper of our family. Since grade school til now, I keep diaries (now called journal / planner) to preserve memories. Then digicams and mobile phone cameras came, and memories were just a snap away to preserve!

But one problem arose: the snapped memories stayed in the gadgets- never printed, or at least shared. Then came IG which revolutionized photo sharing in the mobile web. For the record, long before IG or even Flickr.com came, I was sharing my digipics via Webshots.com- 90s teens will be familiar with this website ;-) Anyway, using IG, writing and memorykeeping all came together in 2013. I finally had enough of not being able to print our family photos and I sorely felt the need to write creatively (as opposed to writing intellectually in G+).

Late 2013, I made a promise to myself to post one photo a day in IG to document our day-to-day life. I have been posting there since 2012 but only when I feel so. At the start, you can see my photo captions were just 1-3 sentences long. After 6 months of posting daily, captions were usually a paragraph long. And then after a year, 2-3 paragraphs long. Which is quite painful to read in a photo-centric app, haha! And that's when I knew I was ready to blog again ♥

source: http://ims85.com/2011/12/07/back-to-blogging

As for printing the photos, I was successful there too. I collected the IG photos bimonthly and made it into a photobook :) Creative writing, check! Memorykeeping, check! Intellectual stimulation, check! And that's not even half of what I was able to do in 2014 (check this blog's title! hihi). Indeed it has been a banner year for me. I was able to meet my personal goals and learned so much in the process. One, that I can overcome my bad habits like procrastination, lol! Two, with commitment, I can actually finish my goals. And three, organization is the key to a successful multitasking mom!

So what's up in 2015 for me? This blog of course! And a host of new things I can't wait to try! :)