Happy Birthday, Baby Bilingual!

This blog is now two years old--you've come a long way, baby! The information I share in this blog has evolved, as have my goals, and of course now I have a would-be bilingual baby myself now, making the research and writing on this blog feel so much more concrete and necessary. How did it all start? Read my first post here.

I've also become a regular columnist for the magnificent Multilingual Living Magazine (though my column needs a new title--"Tatie Teaches a Toddler" is no longer completely accurate! Any suggestions?)

In celebration, I will be slowly upgrading to the "new" Blogger template, a switch I've been considering for a while now. I plan on overhauling the blogrolls in the sidebar, adding new categories of recommended websites and blogs, updating my reading list, and more. As of June 16, I've done a lot of revision, but I'm not done yet. Please let me know if you have any suggestions! And is there any topic or type of resource you'd like to see more of on Bringing up Baby Bilingual?

(Oh, one other question: do you think it would be worth my while to allow Blogger's AdSense or other ads on this site? Would I earn enough to buy a few books every month? Or would seeing an ad at the top of the page compromise the integrity of what has so far been an entirely not-for-profit endeavor?)

By the way, here are some stats on its first two years:

On January 1, 2007, Bringing up Baby Bilingual had received 2,000 hits. By the end of that year, we had reached 10,000. Now the end of our second year (May 23, 2008 was two years exactly), we're up to around 16,000. I've written 172 posts (88,000 words--is that the equivalent of a book yet?)

About 50 people read this blog every day, and while that's not a huge number, it keeps increasing; plus, it makes me happy to realize that I "know" most of the people who leave comments, and I really appreciate that some folks stick around when they arrive here after googling something else. (Among the most popular search terms are bilingualism, babies, and language, but a lot of folks out there are also looking for information on, say, The Very Hungry Caterpillar--which I've only blogged about once--the students in the French play I directed, and plenty of random things too.)

According to SiteMeter, my visitors span the globe: Six continents (what, no one working in Antarctica cares about multilingual munchkins?), 145 different countries (and counting). Y'all come from down the road in Denver and across the world in Malaysia and Mongolia and Macedonia, Ukraine and Yemen, Figi, Mali, Chile, China....

To all my readers near and far, large and small, monolingual and multilingual--merci beaucoup.