Saying Hello

It’s been 416 days since I took down my website, to take, what I thought would be, a 6 month hiatus from blogging.  It was both an easy and hard decision, but most certainly the right one for where my life was in January of last year.

Six months into 2016, I thought about coming back here to check in but realized that life was just too busy between growing Road Warrior Creative, running AWE amidst some fairly significant board member changes, and still trying to be a present mama.  I decided to be honest with myself about my abilities and priorities – for perhaps one of few times in my life – and I kept the site closed down.

Summer flew by with our now standard camping-filled weekends, then came the start of school.  By November, we shared some big news…

and I was starting to think about blogging again, but not quite ready to commit.

In December, I finally acknowledged how much I miss having a place to share thoughts and pieces of my life.  I decided that I would relaunch the site January 1st and began tinkering with a new design and theme when moments allowed.  Life being what it is, there was less time to make the changes that I wanted in December.  I didn’t start blogging again with the New Year, but I did get serious about making time for cleaning up old content and retheme-ing the site.

Two weeks ago, I very sneakily took down the screen blocking it all and now I’m taking the time to say hello again.

Hello.

It seems somehow appropriate to officially “relaunch” the site on March 1st, given I first started blogging here in March of 2010.  In the past 7 years (really six since last year nothing happened), I’ve written 835 blog posts and the website has gone through a number of iterations and designs, some of them awesome, some of them…not so awesome (what was I thinking?).  Now the website looks like this:

A simple home page with a few key call-outs, followed by excerpts from recent posts.  I removed the sidebar everywhere, added a modern menu that comes in on the side, and created adjustments that put focus where it should be: on the writing and images.  I’ve also spent a lot of time going back through old posts to cleanup categorization and photos.  I’m only about 3/4 of the way done with that, but I decided that it was enough to put it out into the world again.  My goal is to have gone through every old post by the end of April, which seems more than reasonable given the rate at which I’m currently going through them.

I’m not sure yet the frequency at which I will blog.  I don’t want to promise anything except that I will be writing here again, though the focus of posts will be shifting.  I’ll still be sharing occasional updates from our life, and lots of photos from our camping and travel adventures, but the new – bigger – focus is going to be on my experiences with business ownership and how it is (or isn’t) meshing with my vision of motherhood.

Over the past year, much has happened and there’s lots to look forward to in the year to come.  Stay tuned and I’ll do my best to keep you updated along the way.