I had an “office day” on Wednesday with Laura from Life With Baby Kicks. As well as being my real-life friend, Laura has turned into my blogging friend, coach, mentor, tech support and general fountain of all knowledge. Wednesday’s little gem was to tell me about an app called 2017 Best Nine. It gives you your 9 most amazing moments from 2017 as judged by your Instagram audience.

Since I was literally in the process of collating my favourite Instagram posts from the year, I was all over it. Immediately.

What is Instagram?

A year ago this would have been completely useless to me since I never actively used Instagram. My 9 most amazing moments from 2017? I didn’t even have 1!

Fast forward 12 months and I have 8,746 likes on 168 posts to date (and we still have 2 weeks life of 2017! I’ve grown to love InstaStories (did NOT get it until about a month ago). And Mr Wanderlust even sighed as he asked if I was going to Instagram the whole of our Maldives holiday.  (Ok, I’m not SO proud of that but it does show how far I have come).

So What Were My 9 Most Amazing Moments From 2017?

Here are my 9 most amazing moments from 2017.

There’s A lot Missing

Now… Bear in mind these were just my most popular posts. There are none from the beginning of the year when I had about 4 followers for example. And there aren’t my favourite moments either.

Like this photo which was my first ever Instagram upload (but apart from that probably wouldn’t have been one of my favourite photos):

Or this one which documents one of my first ever trips without the Things when I headed to Florida for a family wedding weekend (and came home completely broken but happy):

Then there is this one which I LOVE because… well, its not every day that you see camels at the traffic light. Even in the Middle East.

I knew nothing about filters or editing photos at that time save for the presets available on Instagram. I don’t know much more now but at least I know they EXIST!

An Amateur Blogger

The truth is that I’m loving almost all of my photos on Instagram this year for one main reason: It has documented my progress from complete amateur to enthusiastic (but still pretty amateur lol) blogger.

It doesn’t look super pretty like some people’s accounts do. I know some people deliberately put the same filter on all their photos to create a more uniform look. Others post things in a specific order so that you get a nice pattern showing up in the Instagram grid.

Any food photos would make a food blogger wince I am sure.

To be honest I’m sure the more professional travel bloggers would feel the same about me mixing quotes with travel with food with holidays with every day life.

But Thats Ok… It’s MY Account

My account has all the photos from September when I tried to do a photo a day. It has pictures from all our trips this year and lots of special events that have happened in between.

There is a picture of the Things in time out on our first day in the Maldive

And it has documented some wonderful wonderful memories of our summer holidays.

It even has a picture from my first review from the Intercontinental Picnic Brunch at Doha Golf Club where I got my first freebie (I know, I know, technically not a freebie since I wrote the review).

So its a cop out but pretty much ALL my photos are my favourites this year because of the story they tell and the journey I’ve been on (and it’s not finished yet!!)