Why am I doing this?!

I'm having a bit of a crisis of confidence with my blog at the moment, and have been pondering why and what to do about it. I feel like there are many reasons why I am struggling to find the will and the time to write at the moment, not all of which I need to beat myself up about - some of them are temporary (like approaching 'heavy' pregnancy) and some are positive.

Without trying to tempt fate, one reason why I am writing less is that life is ticking along fairly well. I find it easier to write about the boys and parenting when I'm finding it all a challenge - it's definitely cathartic and stops me dwelling on things quite so much if I get it down on paper. And at the moment we are trundling along pretty well. Don't get me wrong, we still have plenty of challenges (T is doing a good impression of the awkward middle child, W is moving us into a whole new world of parenting challenges as he gets older, and A has suddenly developed his own opinion on things he really doesn't need to have an opinion on yet, like which coat he wants to wear) but our day to day life is definitely calmer at the moment.

On a practical level, I am also pooped! I'm finding this pregnancy easier than previous ones but growing another small person is still starting to take its toll. Once the boys are in bed each evening my enthusiasm for anything other than staring at the TV and the odd bit of crochet is non-existent.

While I am doing less on my blog, I have been doing more on Instagram - it is much easier to find the time to post a pretty picture and a short comment on my phone than get my laptop out and write something for my blog. The boys are much more involved in Instagram, to the extent that when we do anything with our beautiful wooden toys or craft now they ask me to take a picture, and they enjoy looking at other people's feeds on there.

I also find it more rewarding in a way as I've gained Instagram followers at a much quicker rate than blog readers (particularly once you discount readers who are related to me!). But I don't want to be sucked into feeling like the only measure of success from blogging and sharing what we are up to is to have people follow my account and like my posts. One of the main motivations for starting my blog last year was to have a better record of what the boys and I are up to and that hasn't changed.

So I am going to persevere on here, as well as on Instagram, and keep writing about more factual things like good places to go with three small children, as well as what we are up to at home with the tuff tray and the seasons table and some of our crafty activities. And I suspect once a fourth child is thrown into the mix I will have lots of struggles to write about again, even if I don't have much time to do it!