SHE LIVES!

(A few weeks ago on the plane to Florida)

Today, inspiration hit. Projects I wanted to start working on for Adelaide's upcoming (5th!) birthday party, a little DIY porch sign, designing shirts for Amazon Merch, a video on how I made the play kitchen in Adelaide's playhouse (finally, after it being on my to-do list for almost 3 years!) and a where-in-the-world-have-I-been? blog post suddenly seemed like the most important things to tackle. And I actually got going on a couple of things and finished one! And now, at 9:20 pm, a solid 3 hours past the time of day when I would normally be able to scrounge up even the teensiest bit of motivation to do anything other than sit on the couch melting my brain with mindless TV, I'm here at the computer with sticky glue residue on my fingers from project #2 today and digging into this blog post. 

Where did this sudden surge of inspiration and motivation come from?

I wondered when it even was when I was last regularly blogging. I started flipping back through my blog seeing months between posts for more than the last year. I can say with certainty that it was some time before Mercer was born. A lot has happened since then! I think it's time for a life update!

Let's see, how about if we go back to when Mercer was born?

Of course, having a new baby around is reason enough to cut back on extra hobbies such as blogging, but add a part-time work from home job into the mix with a 3-year-old and 6-week-old, and blogging just completely fell of the radar. Did I ever mention here that I was a stylist for Stitch Fix? Maybe? No? Yes?

If anyone ever tries to tell you that it will be easy to work 15 hours a week from home with 2 kids scream "LIAR!!!" at the top of your lungs and cut a rug like your life depends on it. (Not that anyone told me it would be easy. No one other than me, at least.)

Okay, obviously that's an exaggeration because there are plenty of people who can and do do that and even more. But I can say that, for me, 15 hours a week was a lot harder to scrape together than I thought it would be. And it just got harder as Mercer got older and napped less and less. I can only imagine how hard it would be now with him down to napping 2 (or less) hours a day! Alas, I made it work for nearly a year, until this past April when I decided to call it quits. I got tired of calling on Peppa Pig and Daniel Tiger to babysit Adelaide every time I got Mercer to sleep so I could work, and felt like that time with Adelaide and time for me to keep up with things that I value around the house and just a bit of time here and there for me to regain sanity were more important at this point in my life. 

Also, around this time last year, we tackled a fairly big home reno. We enclosed our breezeway to give us an office/playroom (the old office become Mercer's room), extra space in our dining room, a pantry and mudroom. We also replaced the tile in the hallway/living room/kitchen/dining with wood look tile that really made all the difference! There are still bits and pieces around related to that reno that aren't finished, but we are (very) slowly tackling what we can and I have hopes that one day it will be complete :) Or we will move and leave it to the next guy, haha!

Mercer also went on his first plane ride for a trip to Florida for a family reunion with Jordan's Chicago cousins and Grandmother. The plane ride went about a million times better than we thought it would (our expectations were the lowest of low, so don't get any ideas about it being a breeze ;) Overall, the trip was a lot of work, but completely worth it and I'm happy to say we did it and survived!

I've got so much more I feel like I could say to generally update on my/our lives and all of the inspiration, uncertainty, hope, and anxiety on life ahead, but I think I'll leave that all on the table for next time. And the time after that, and after that. Can you tell I'm optimistic that I might be back sooner than later? Let's hope!