Tuesday, April 12, 2016

The Blog Awakens

Hey. It's been awhile! Did you miss me? 

I haven't taken this long of a break from my blog in awhile, not since Sam was born. I wasn't planning on taking such a long break, but then I read this great book Essentialism in January that helped me to re-order my priorities and simplify my life. I realized that some things in my life need to go on the back burner, and blogging is one of them. It's just not an essential, and I want to focus on the essentials so that I can get really good at them. What are the essentials, you may ask? That's a post for a different day, but suffice it to say that there are four of them and none of them involve a computer or the internet!

But it doesn't mean that I have to cut blogging out completely. I've been thinking about doing that, but my family apparently misses my posts and since we live far away from them, I will continue to blog about our life so that they can see what we're doing out here in the Midwest, especially as far as the kids are concerned. And there is value in recording our lives in this way, especially since I have my blog published in book format each year. That's living, breathing family history work right there! Not really, but you know what I mean. I plan to still sometimes do thoughtful posts about things I have opinions about and silly posts about things I have opinions about, because I like to write and get my opinions out there, for whatever they're worth.

I don't think I'm going to blog about our vacations anymore, because those posts are time-consuming to put together and it's redundant to do it because I make photo albums of our trips and I usually post my favorite pictures of each trip on Facebook. I think a Facebook photo album and an actual photo album are enough. {Simplify!} I may do some posts about a few aspects of vacation, or one that contains my favorite pictures, but that's it. So I deleted the blogging file folders on my desktop that contained the pictures of our trip to Orlando in November 2014 and our cruise to the Caribbean in March 2015, and I'm not even going to go there with our (amazing) trip to DisneyWorld last month. You shall never know the joys of those trips on my blog! Sorry! I'm sure you're devastated.

I'm not going to blog anymore the way I've done for years where it's part of my almost daily schedule. It takes too much time and I don't get enough personal benefit from it to give it that much time anymore. Right now I'm thinking I'll do it for about half the year, and only when I have the time in my day to do it. An hour here, an hour there, and that's it. I'm also going to stop reading as many blogs and just pick a few to keep following. Simplification is the name of the game! And I am in it to win it! (Enough of the cliches, Donna!) 

So that's my plan as far as my "sweet" little blog here goes.
Do you like the title of this post? I do, because it alludes to one of my new favorite movies, The Force Awakens. I think it may have the best movie trailer of all time. Almost every time I watch it, I get goosebumps or tear up. It has so many parallels to what I believe about life and the purpose of life.
I love this trailer. I'm not crazy, I swear.



The blog has officially awakened!