Hello, Is Anyone Out There?

It has been 1 year, 9 months and 3 days since I last published a blog post on this website. At that time, we had just moved from Colorado to Texas and I thought that I was going to revive my blog. I wrote a handful for posts, but then life and business got in the way and I let the website fall silent again.

Over the last 642 days, a lot has changed in our world – and I’m not just talking about the craziness that is COVID-19. There have been changes in our business as we grew our team and adjusted our focus. We achieved our dream of purchasing a travel trailer and spent two fabulous summers traveling the middle and western half of the country, and even filmed an episode of a TV show, Going RV.

Perhaps the biggest change is that last November, we grew from a family of five to a family of six with the surprise addition of our sweet little Vivienne.

Once A Blogger, Always A Blogger

Parenting and entrepreneurial demands took up most of my attention and kept me from posting anything more than occasional Instagram posts, but when something big or interesting would happen, I would say to Chris, “I really should write about this.”

It was passing thought, mostly, easily set aside with the notion that there were other more important ways to spend my time. But the truth is, when you spend so many years of your life documenting things as I did, it’s hard not to feel called to write more.

In the past 6 months, our world turned upside-down and we were dragged, kicking and screaming, into the alternate universe that is Coronavirus. As 2020 progressed, I’ve found myself thinking with increasing frequency that I ought to be blogging about this unique time.

I should be documenting what is happening and how it’s impacting my family. There should be some record the girls can look back on, and I can’t help but thinking that perhaps I can bring something to the important conversations happening right now.

Redoing My Site

Finally, three weeks ago, I put the kids to bed and decided that it was time to work on my website instead of doing anything else. And so that is what I did.

Somewhat sneakily I took the website offline (or so I thought, there might have been a notification, or (gulp) 12, that spammed people when I imported demo content… oops; sorry).

Over a week and a half, I redesigned and rebuilt the theme and I adjusted page content to better represent me and where I am in my life right now. I powered through the “fast and dirty” way, cowboy coding right on the site in a manner that would horrify the developers on my team, but I got it done and pushed it live all without really telling anyone – outside of the few people who noticed my little Lorem Ipsum content import goof.

Then I spent 15+ hours combing through old blog posts fixing broken images from a previous poorly done migration years ago (I can only blame myself) and cleaning up deprecated content (like broken pins in my Saturday Surfing posts that are in an old format no longer supported by Pinterest). There are 848 posts on this website, so I’m only halfway done with this task, but I’m happy with what I’ve accomplished thus far, and I’m hoping to chip away at the rest of them over the next couple of months.

And Here We Are

The whole time I was working on the new design for the site, I mused on what my first post “back” should be. It’s hard to know where to start when I’ve been away so long and so much has changed in the world since I last wrote. On top of that, there is so much that I want to say.

Tonight, I think I’m going to leave it at this – a quick re-introduction to who we are and a promise to come back and write more, but with absolutely no promise of when that might be. In the past, I have tried to commit myself to write posts on a specific schedule. Outside the early days when I was blogging as a stay-at-home mom on Nantucket, it never worked.

Now I’m older and wiser, with 4 times as many children, and so I’m going to stick to reality and be okay with it. I can’t promise you how frequently I’ll write, but I will find my way back into the saddle, and I hope you’ll join me for the ride.

A Reintroduction

In case you’re new here, and really because it’s been so long since I last wrote, it seems only fitting to sign off with an updated photo of my family from last week. Here we all are:

Me, my hubby, Chris, and our four beautiful daughters: Nora, almost 11, Zara, 7.5, Adelaide, 3, and Vivienne, 9 months. I’m looking forward to sharing my story with you.