Blogiversary 5: It is On Like Donkey Kong

Holy cow, have we truly been blogging for half a decade?! Crazytown.

It feels like simply yesterday that we were creating a basic page with a big blue-background so friends and family members could drop in on our first home’s kitchen makeover.

For our fifth blogiversary we hoped to host a parade complete with homeowners marching by waving hammers and paint rollers, but since we could not get that together – and it honestly sounded like someone could lose an eye that way – we chose to go for the next best thing: a week of blogiversary madness and behind the scenes hullabaloo (simply like we have done for the past few years here, here, and here). And the festivities start right now. So feel free to toss out some chest bumps and fist pumps. It is about to get journal-a-delic up in here (anybody have a black light?). Here are a few of the things that we have on the agenda for this week:

• a timeline of how we met, fell in love, began blogging, and ended up here (which is in fact right in this post – we did not waste any time, haha)
• a fairly crazy giveaway with a ton of excellent $500 prizes in honor of The Big 5
• a day in the life post with a bunch of pictures and details about an average day for us
• a math-tastic rundown of our journal stats, growth, and other numerical goodness along with seven bloggy facts that might simply blow your mind (no guarantees, but ours are officially blown)
• a no-holds-barred Q&A video full of answers to personal questions that hundreds of you folks submitted via Facebook
• all of our goals for the coming year (and a rundown of how we did on last year’s)
• a big ol’ list of our go-to/least go-to/hardest/most memorable/weirdest/etc posts over the last five years (there have certainly been some doozies)
• a warm and fuzzy getting-to-know-you post about you folks (who you are, where you live, what you enjoy – we cannot wait to hear from you!)

Without further ado, here is a big ol’ timeline that we made in photoshop that dates all the way back to 2004. Holy buckets, was that truly nearly ten years ago? A lot of the things on this timeline were defining moments for us, either in our personal lives or the life of YHL. And a bunch of them in fact make us all misty eyed. Seriously, no one is more surprised than we are to be where we are today, and we could not have done it without all of you remarkable folks who take the time to drop in on us and see what we are up to. You’ve made this whole journal-tastic journey possible for our family, and sometimes I get that embarrassing lower-lip-quiver when I think about it too long. You folks put the enjoy in YHL.

Time flies when you are having lively (and meeting, moving, marrying, starting a journal, having a baby, writing a book, and otherwise holding on the for ride). Are you folks somewhere you’d never imagine you’d end up five years ago? We are so thankful that we began this random little journal, and so quite humbled that you folks have become a part of our lives and created this fully unexpected way of life for our family. We enjoy you. Truly. Now somebody get me a tissue.

Psst- Itching to learn more about blogging as a business? So are we. Simply kidding. Well, I am half serious since we are certainly still learning as we go. But here is a giant collection of posts about how our journal baby grew, how we make money, how we spend our time, how we get sponsors, and a lot of other behind the scenes blogging stuff (like paying quarterly taxes, becoming an LLC, getting our own health insurance, etc).