Our First Year of Life

This week, First Steps celebrates its first year of life. On the occasion of our first birthday, we’d like to share some reflections with you, our readers, in this post. In addition, we’d like to take the opportunity to announce an exciting schedule of guest posts that will be published throughout the week.

First and foremost, we want to emphasize that at this birthday party, all of you, our readers, are the guests of honor—just as you’ve been throughout this past year. With that said, we’ll get the party started by thanking all of you for joining us here on the blog and recommending us, for reading, commenting, sharing on Facebook, and tweeting our posts, and for cheering us on with words of encouragement. When we started the blog, we set out to create a space to dialogue with you, and every opportunity we have to interact with you brings us immense pleasure.

This year, we published 67 articles, an average of just over one per week. Each post is published simultaneously on our blogs in Spanish and English. During that same period, First Steps received nearly 18,000 visitors, and our pages were accessed 30,500 times, or more than 80 times a day. The United States, Colombia, Peru, Argentina and Mexico account for the most visits to our blog, with almost 65% of our readers hailing from these five countries.

The following posts received the most attention this past year:

• Good Reasons for Extra Hugs by Daniela Philipp
• Don’t Send Your Child to Daycare… by Florencia López-Boo
• A Preview of Three Important Studies on Early Childhood Development by Mónica Rubio
• Helping Children Succeed in Life Softly also by Daniela Philipp
• What Matters in Early Learning Guidelines by Christine Van Keuren

If you haven’t already read these articles, we encourage you to do so, as many of our readers seemed to find them particularly interesting. We’d like to highlight that First Steps has been greatly enriched by the contributions of not only those who author this blog on a regular basis but also colleagues from different divisions within the IDB, who wrote some 60% of the published posts. For 2013, we’re planning to bring together even more voices in this space, from both inside and outside our institution.

Lastly, on the occasion of our first birthday, we would like to thank and acknowledge the contributions of the great team that runs this blog, ensuring that it’s published promptly and that it looks attractive. You know Florencia and me because we write frequently for the blog, but you’ve also enjoyed posts by Danny Philipp, who has had great success with her blogging contributions.

Whom you know less is Serrana Mujica. With her optimism, smarts, and creativity, she has been instrumental in breathing life into First Steps and giving it a personality.

During this week of celebration, we’ll post new articles almost daily. We’re honored to have contributions from special guests, among them Mirta Roses, Director of the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO), and Santiago Levy, Vice President for Sectors and Knowledge at the IDB.

We invite you to join us in celebrating our birthday week, and we’ll continue to dialogue with you in this space throughout 2013.