Happy 4th Birthday, A Barefoot Gal! + Pen Pal Themed Giveaway

Hello everyone!

Guess what today is! If you answered that it’s either my brothers birthday, Mother’s Day, Frog Jumping Day, or my blog’s fourth blogiversary, you are correct! Since, after all, this is on my blog, I will mainly be discussing that holiday but before we start here’s a little bit on the other holidays. Besides, it would be strange if I went straight to the point, right? I gotta throw in some random stuff first. 🙂

Holiday The First:

Logan is the tall one with the double baseball cap. (GO NATIONALS! ⚾)

HAPPY BIRTHDAY LOGAN! My older brother turned… well, older (I can’t say his exact age) today. Logan is not really into any sort of blogging stuff so he’ll probably just raise an eyebrow or something if I tell him you said happy birthday, but you can still wish him happy birthday in the comments. 😉 Basically all of my favorite music artists were found because of Logan and most of my baseball knowledge comes from him. Logan is quite educated in all things baseball. He also is great at speaking German. Well, I don’t know German, but when he says some German snippet it sounds convincing enough. 😛 So there’s a bit on Holiday The First.

Holiday The Second:

HAPPY MOTHER’S DAY, MOM! And happy Mother’s Day to my wonderful Grammy and Grandma too!

My mom does everything from teaching, to cooking, to gardening, and does all of it very well. 🙂 She’s given me my love of flowers and gardening and told me numerous tricks and tips about this. Actually, that’s an understatement because I have basically learned every gardening thing from her. She also inspired me to start blogging when she started a blog several years ago. Happy Mother’s day to my wonderful mom!

Holiday The Third:

Happy Frog Jumping Day. Yay frogs! The end.

Holiday The Fourth:

Happpyy birthday to blog! Happy birthday to blog! Happy birthday dear blooggg, happy birthday to blog!

Four years ago today I opened up a blog named A Barefoot Gal. I originally wanted it to be The Barefoot Girl, but that and almost every other version of the name was taken. So A Barefoot Gal it was! I had started three months before with dandelionsanddaisys.wordpress.com, but I didn’t like the name and the URL had a typo, so I switched. (That website eventually turned into WordPress Kid Blogs which you can now find at wpkidblogs.wordpress.com.)

You may or may not have heard that story before, depending on how long you’ve been reading my blog, but my stats are always changing so on to those! 🙂 I’m scheduling this post so these are as of May 11th, 2018.

All-time views: 90,604

All-time visitors: 18,589

All-time comments: 20,195

All-time likes: 11,552

Total posts: 525

Total tags (this one is somehow slightly embarrassing. XD): 1,383

Total followers: 1,436

Best views ever: 515 on December 14, 2017

Top referrer: afarmgirlslife.wordpress.com

Most viewed post/post with most likes: Garden Photography

I also have some pretty peculiar searches. The funniest ones have to do with being barefoot: “britt nicole barefooted”, “barefoot survey teen”, “i was barefoot on christmas” (wow, congratulations), “barefoot on barbed wire” (umm… ouch), “going to starbucks barefoot” (xD xD), “going to a fair barefoot”, “girl barefoot painfully cold” (WHAT ON EARTH), “barefoot twins”… you get the point. A lot of them are also from my Bing vs. Google post too: “is bing now better than google” (yup), “reasons why bing is better than google”, “bing better than google 2016”, “dancing puffins on bing” (yay April Fool’s homepage!), “bing is better than google 2016” (and it’s not in 2017 and 2018??), and “is bing good” (UH YES) are some of them. It’s quite entertaining to look at all the searches.

All in all, it’s been a good four years of blogging! And to celebrate I’m going to do a giveaway for you all! It’s going to be sort of pen-pal themed, but you certainly don’t have to be a pen pal to enter. 🙂

Are you wondering what I’m going to give away? My featured image may have spoiled some of the surprise, but here are the items in more detail.

What I’m giving away:

a pad of 36 decorative cardstock papers
two watercolor leaf-y notebooks with a slightly random quote from Shakespeare on the front. Just pretend it’s not April.
ten kraft paper envelopes
one roll of doodle-y spring washi tape
a surprise item or two (aka something I forgot to take pictures of)

The scrapbook paper has some really pretty patterns in it such as the one above. My sister got the same kind for her birthday and I liked it so I decided to get one for this giveaway. 🙂 The size of the paper is 6×6 (inches).

Next up are two really pretty watercolor notebooks. The first one has watercolor ferns with the Shakespeare quote in gold, and the second has watercolor tropical leaves and also has the quote in gold. Inside it has lined off-white pages with a section to write the date and little circles to fill in for the day of the week. I got two of these for myself and I was surprised how little showed through when I wrote on one side of a page with a pen!

Here are some brown paper envelopes I got from Hobby Lobby. These are nice and sturdy. I’ve gotten some in the past and they work really well. They are also a fairly large size which is nice for sending rather large letters!

Finally, here’s a cute roll of washi tape to use on envelopes or letters or practically anything else.

There’s also a mystery item as I mentioned before.

Requirements for entering this giveaway:

If you are under 18, you have to have parent’s permission to enter this giveaway, because I will need your address to send you these things.
When you enter, please include a valid email in the email box because I’ll be using that to email you if you win. Your email will not be seen by anyone but me.
You have to live in the U.S. Sorry, but I’d prefer not to pay that much shipping if you live in a different country.

Bonus entries:

Pin the image at the end of this post to Pinterest. 2 extra entries
Tell a friend (or as many as you want, but you just get one extra entry per friend). 1 extra entry
Reblog this post/mention it in your post. 3 extra entries

How to enter:

Simply fill in this contact form!