This post was meant to be about new year’s resolutions, which, briefly, for me are to:

– Get back to the gym, lose a stone, grow taller

– Feel less stressed by the noise/mess/chaos that emanates from the boys

– Blog less under the influence

– Make more – not fewer – honest Facebook updates such as, “My kids are bored. We’re climbing the walls here!” (why not tell everyone how it really is?)

– Eat more dark chocolate to give me the endorphin-high needed to keep up with my children

But then I got a rather spiffy email from WordPress.com this morning, with roaming spotlights, fireworks, a map and more.

My ‘2012 in Blogging’ annual report – I started scrolling, intrigued.

I have to admit I laughed out loud (while secretly being quite pleased) at the comparison to Jay-Z. Some 19,000 people packed out the new Barclays Center in New York to see the rapper perform recently. Circles in the Sand was viewed about 120,000 times in 2012. If the blog were a concert at the Barclays Center, it would take six sold-out performances for that many people to see it [laughs in disbelief again].

I’m under no illusions – a large proportion of those hits were people running an image search on the world’s tallest building, the Burj Khalifa, which I wrote about in September 2011. For some reason, the search engines love this post, causing more than 68,000 people to crash-land, accidentally, on my ramblings.

But there are other posts, too, that have proven popular and are more relevant to the tired, expat mummies who relate to my life:

In order of the most-viewed posts in 2012:

Expat brats: The signs to look out for – (clearly a pressing concern in Dubai)

A sticky story about having a housemaid – (no prizes for linking this to the above)

On yelling at your kids – (oh Gawd, please don’t let this be what I’m remembered for)

I was also interested to learn what search words, other than the Burj Khalifa and yelling, had sent internet users my way: not sure what this says about my life, but the most-frequent search terms that led to my blog were hair salon, Kidzania and Duran Duran.

So there it was in black and white: readers of Circles in the Sand are under the impression I’m an all-singing, Shouty Mummy, cavorting round the house to the sound of Wild Boys and The Reflex – with nice hair.

Could be worse.