I'm Back! :)

Hi everyone, I’ve missed y’all so much but I’m happy to announce that today I’ll be back on the ‘blogging bandwagon’ after my long hiatus. I know, it really has been a long, unannounced absence and I’m deeply grateful for the number of emails I received from kind people asking if I was okay and where I had been.

Let me start from the beginning: I began this blog for a few reasons, one of the main ones being that I simply love to write. I always have, it’s a stress relief and a creative outlet in many ways. The other reasons are simply to share some ideas, get to know people, and keep in touch with some of my more long distance friends and family members.

While I love the social community on the ‘blogosphere', the real world one will always top my priority list which was a HUGE part of the reason I took such a long break. :)

You see, about a year and a half ago, I happily became “Mrs. Farm Girl Teacher” at a small ceremony in Tennessee. It was one of the happiest movements in my life and has been a wonderful journey ever since. While on our honeymoon, my husband I made a deal to limit the usage of our phones/social media—opting instead to focus on the moment before us. It was in a word—freeing. All of a sudden, a stress I didn’t know I even had was lifted off my shoulders! I made a personal decision at that moment to continue this route, constantly reminding myself that my real-world relationships must always be put first. You see, it wasn’t that I’d been putting them second, the problem was that I had been allowing the stress of constant posting bother me, when it really didn’t have to be a pressure at all!

I wanted to dedicate our first year of marriage to him fully, and then decide if and where this blog would fit in later. I have to be honest, in many ways it was absolutely glorious! I still followed other favorite blogs of mine (check out Farmish Momma and No Big Dill if you haven’t already) but I didn’t allow myself to become troubled over my own, simply responded to emails from fans and people who had questions about some of the crochet patterns they’d downloaded. I won’t lie—I also flooded my draft folders with titles of posts I wanted to jot down so I wouldn’t forget later. I’ll be slowly going through that but I have to say, for some of them I have no idea what I was thinking! (I have to throw in this reference for my mom—remember the Seinfeld episode where he wakes up in the middle of the night to jot down the ‘hilarious’ joke? haha that’s what I feel like!)

Shortly after our one year anniversary, I began to think about this blog once again, but once again life had other plans. (I’ll make this short and to-the-point because I have a whole other blog post coming on this soon) Basically I have a neurological disorder that had other plans for me. All of a sudden, symptoms began to rear their ugly head and my life took a few hits as a result. Nothing major, I’m perfectly okay, but once again, my priority list changed dramatically. As I said, I want to wait and go more into depth on this later, but I will go ahead and spoil the ending for you. :) My wonderful doctor assisted in starting me on a new medication and for the moment everything seems to be under control!

I am now happy to announce that I am back for as long as life sees fit. My health and real world relationships will always be the biggest priority but the truth is that this blog is something I love and will only become a burden if I allow it to. (Which I don’t plan on again!) I love meeting new people and some of the wonderful conversations we have via email and sites like Ravelry and Craftsy and I have had many family members who’ve talked about how much they enjoy keeping up with our family in this way.