Thank You, Everyone -and a Giveaway

When I first started this blog, 3 years, 2 weeks, and 3 days ago, I did so purely as a lark.  I do things like that, start something, then get distracted and -hey! something shiny!


Since then, the blog's readership has grown from consisting solely of my brother, mother, father, and mother-in-law, to including people on at least five continents (I'm still counting my cousin as my European reader, even though she's since come back to the States).  This fact absolutely astounds me, and I want to thank every single one of you.  I always think of this blog as a modern pen pal sort of thing, and I have met so many funny, intelligent, interesting people through it.  Lots of the people I've met are also moms, and I can't tell you how much I appreciate hearing your words of commiseration after a particularly exasperated post (see: anything labeled "Gabriel" or "Jude")


I bring this all up for a reason.  Yesterday marked two big deals for this blog.  
1. The 58th person subscribed to Clan Donaldson.  Again, for a blog that started out purely as a goof of limited interest to anyone outside of family, I am extremely amazed by this fact.  Thank you to everyone who takes the time to visit me here, whether a subscriber, an occasional reader, or people who come to check in just to make sure I haven't gone off the deep end yet.
2. Yesterday, I had over 700 visitors.  To this blog.  In a single day.  Speaking as a woman who often goes days and days without leaving the house, being under a sort of self-imposed house arrest where many of my jailers are only semi-verbal and all of them are insane, knowing that so many people have shared in some of our life makes the mommy isolation less intense.
Again, thank you to everyone who spends part of your day with us.  I hope that I give you something for your time, a laugh, a feeling that you're not alone, a moment of gratitude that it's me, and not you.  Whatever.  Thank you.  Know that whatever you've taken from this blog, you've given me much more in return.


And so, I'd like to give away something tangible.  I have two sets of note cards from my Etsy shop for you.
The first one is a set of eight thank you cards.

They're purdy and they feature one of the mushrooms we found on our hike at Great Pond last year.


The second set has four different pictures from the Farmington Valley.  There's eight of them, and they're also very purdy.

See?  Purdy.
All you have to do is leave a comment at the end of this post.*  It doesn't even have to be a full sentence.  I'll leave it open until next Wednesday, then I'll draw two commenters at random (I only included that link because the fact that such a website exists is both fascinating and hilarious to me) and announce the winners on next Thursday's post.


Again, thank you to everyone who reads, comments, and contributes to this blog.  I wish I had a million dollars and a pony to give away to every one of you, but if I had ponies, I suspect Lotus would refuse to part with them.


*Mom, you can't enter.  You can't ask why, but it rhymes with "because your birthday's coming up".