Tackling the week ahead and some blogging resources

How is it Monday already? This weekend flew by and I'm not ready to be back at work yet. We had a pretty low-key weekend visiting some friends and family and getting over our colds, but I definitely didn't get anything too productive accomplished! I guess that's what next weekend is for?? It is boggling my mind that we only have about 7 more weekends until Baby #2 arrives (give or take one or two!). We don't have much to get done, but there is a lot that I want to sort through/organize/clean before welcoming the little bundle into the world :)

(via)

We spent some time watching the Olympics on Saturday (Molly LOVED it and cheered "Go Canada Go!" when we explained it to her), and I hadn't realized that I would be so emotional watching Canadian athletes at these games. I have always felt a bit emotional when Canada wins gold at the Olympics, with the anthem playing and all of that, but my pregnancy hormones have thrown me even further out of whack emotionally. I was SO excited to see 2 sisters win gold and silver in moguls skiing on Saturday!! How cute are they?!? I can't imagine how it would feel to win an Olympic medal and stand on the podium next to your sister.

The Dufour-Lapointe sisters (the third sister finished 12th) (Via)

As you may have noticed last week, I updated a few things on my blog and I wanted to share the tutorials I used for the update, in case anyone else is in need of them!

1) To add social media icons, I mostly used the tutorial here.

2) For the header (which I will be updating again this week), I previously used this tutorial here.

3) For the favicon, which is complete but not uploaded yet, I used Hubby Jack's tutorial here.

My next goal is to update my "About me" section and take some more professional photos to put in that section, so watch for that! I am also attempting to use my blog twitter account more frequently. I still have a personal twitter account, which I had used to follow a lot of my favourite blogs, so I'm trying to merge the two. I haven't really shared my blog with very many family members and real-life friends, so I want to keep my blog accounts and personal accounts separate.

I also wanted to share a few articles/blog posts/series that may be of interest to beginner (or even veteran) bloggers like myself!

1) Grow your blog/tweak your pinterest page (Jen has started a whole great series on growing your blog)
2) Sarah at Venus Trapped in Mars has a great series of Saturday Sessions about blogging
3) Kelli at She Crab Soup shares blogging resources every week. This post was particularly interesting to me, but she shares useful tips all the time.
4) Lauren talks about blogging a lot, and her tutorials and discussions are awesome. Here's a few of her tips.
5) Good old Pinterest has a lot of resources too (obviously) ;)

Does anyone else have any other fantastic resources to share? I have lists of them all over the place, and Google provides a lot of answers too.

I think it's easy to get overwhelmed by all the things that you can do to grow your blog. In some ways, I'm not even sure if I want to "grow my blog" exponentially, but I do find that I benefit from the interactions and connections I've made from other bloggers, so I want to put my best foot forward and see where the year takes me! (I'm sure as soon as I tell my friends and family about the blog, however, there will be no shortage of readers...hahaha).