Take Two

Well, it’s been a hot minute. Or four years worth of minutes. 

In June 2014, I took a step back from my little blog for three major reasons. First, it takes a lot of time to maintain a blog and I was in a crazy busy season where I was working full time while my husband was in school full time and blogging was just too much to throw into the mix.  Second, I felt a little uninspired. I couldn’t channel all the ideas swirling in my head into a cohesive vision for what my blog should be. My posts started to feel random, I never really had a plan for what was next, and it just felt chaotic (exactly the opposite of what I was going for). The last reason I decided to stop was because I felt a little uneasy with drawing a line for how much to share. Our world is becoming SO interconnected through technology and I felt like many of the bloggers I followed were sharing details of their family and lives and I wasn’t comfortable doing the same.

So without really intending to, I just stopped. I didn’t realize my anniversary post would be “it” for the blog. It was summer and we took a vacation and upon returning … the blog just fell by the wayside. I kept up my Instagram account for a few more months but that gradually faded out too.

April 2015 came around and I got an email that it was time to renew my domain name. I wasn’t sure yet what I wanted to do with the blog so I just paid the fee and didn’t think about it for the rest of the year. This happened again in 2016. And 2017. And each year, I thought “you know, I’m not touching that blog anymore – why am I paying this fee? I should just give it up.” But each time, something held me back from totally letting go and I kept on paying the domain fee. Not only that, but the word “simplify” has become a bit of a mantra for me and has stuck around all these years (it was even the word I chose to practice when I took a calligraphy class a few months ago).

This April, that email came again and I finally spent some real time analyzing why I kept paying for something I wasn’t ever using. I told myself I needed to start seriously considering why I couldn’t seem to let this go and promised myself that by 2019 I would either be blogging again or would stop paying for the domain.

I was listening to a podcast one day (Happier with Gretchen Rubin) and it suggested a “happiness hack” of thinking back to what you enjoyed doing when you were 10 years old. The argument was that you would probably still enjoy that activity now. I thought back and two things burst into my mind: reading and writing. I loved both so much when I was 10 years old. And I realized that I still read a ton today, but I don’t write. And a little niggling thought came into my mind: this is what your blog is for.

I have spent a lot of time over the past few months dedicating real thought to what I want for this space. I feel like this time around, I know what I’m getting into a little better and have a better plan for time management and vision.  My life has changed significantly since my last post four-plus years ago and therefore this blog will look different. The month of September will have a lot of “catch-up” posts to bring you up to speed with my life but once we’re caught up, I will proceed with two blog posts a week (Tuesday/Thursday) and I plan to keep certain aspects of my family’s life private (such as full names and the specific town we live in).  I’m very excited and I hope you’ll stick around for the ride!