Another year has come and gone, and thus closes another A to Z Challenge. 

This is my third year doing the A to Z Challenge, and I’ve come to a few important conclusions:

1. I need a theme. I’ve flirted with the idea of not having a theme and just writing random posts, but that seems like pure insanity to me. Props to anyone who can actually do it, but that is definitely not how I roll.
2. It’s best to do prep beforehand. The first year I did this challenge, I did the least amount of prep possible and the challenge was very stressful. Last year, I started prepping in January (still stressful!) and this year I started prepping in March.
3. Write as many posts as possible before the challenge starts. Last year, I had a good number of posts written before the challenge started, but I still struggled to get them all done on time. This year, I had every single post (except this one) scheduled before March 30th. It was amazing. I just had to let them be published every day.
4. I never keep up with blogs as much as I want to. I really tried this year to visit other blogs. I had hoped that having all my posts scheduled before would give me extra time to branch out and look at other blogs. I was great for the first week and then life happened and I just stopped. I’m sorry. I’ll try better next year.
5. Trying to write my reflection post and create links to all my pages in one day is a pain in the butt and having 27 tabs open at one time crashes my browser. I should do this as the challenge unfolds next year, not all in one day.

I loved my theme of the Kitchener Rangers this year! Possibly even more than my Harry Potter theme from last year. I really enjoyed reminiscing about my time in high school and getting reconnected to hockey. I tried to pick some of my favourite posts that I wrote for the challenge, but I had about half the alphabet listed and decided that I can’t pick just a small few.

If you are wanting to take a look back or missed a few days, here is a list of all my posts from this past challenge. I’d love to hear which one you enjoyed the most!

Azevedo   Benoit   Clarkson   Duco and Dirienzo   Eminger   Fraser   Grennier   Harrison   Inglis   Johnston   Kanko and Kindl   Lashoff   McFarland and McGrath   Noble   O’Nabigon   Pepe   Quinn   Richards and Roy   Smith   Turple   Uniac   Valabik   Woods    Devereaux Hashmatpour   Yovanic   Zwilack

And just like that, we are finished for another year. I hope all those who wrote for the challenge had fun. If it was your first time – congrats on making it through! Even if you didn’t finish, it’s still awesome that you participated! Any suggestions for my theme for next year are always appreciated, there will probably be an “I can’t pick a theme” meltdown in or around January or February haha.