Hello, my old friend. It’s been a while. Things have been a bit… strange.

The life we have been living during this coronavirus has been so different and I just found that I didn’t want to write about travel and look at pictures from our travels when I was trapped inside my house for so long. I couldn’t bring myself to find any joy in this blog and so I allowed myself a break. I gave myself the grace to walk away from something I had worked so hard on and labored for so many hours on and just let it go.

During this respite, I thought long and hard about why I keep this record and for whom. Do I do it for our friends and family, so that you can all keep up with what we are doing and watch our children grow up through the years? Do I do it for the kids, so they can have a record of their childhood? Or do I do it for myself, to remind myself that in our one beautiful life, our family went out and did as much as we could of the things that bring us joy? 

In the end, I believe it is a mix of all of those things. If it was just one of them, it might be easier to let this go. To stop worrying about being behind on posts. To not spend my free time editing pictures or trying to find newer, more interesting ways of describing common activities like bike-riding or hiking. To wonder if anyone even reads this.

There have been times that this blog has felt like a burden and other times like a gift I give my future self. I suppose that’s not so different from how we view life itself. 

For now, I’m going to pick up where I left off. In September of 2019. 

I’m going to look back at those pictures of unmasked people that I haven’t seen in two years and I’m going to be grateful that we are still here and healthy. And when the time comes that we can all be together again, I’m going to blog about it.