Hello Again, Old Friend

I started this blog in 2005 as a way to keep my friends and family filled in on my adventures studying abroad in Lille, France.  I kept up with it through ten more years of adventures, all over Europe, in Panama, Uruguay, Peru, India, Mexico and more. Through heartbreak and happiness, and through at least a hundred book reviews.

In late 2014, I had a baby and just a few months later we moved to Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, our first post as a Foreign Service family. At the time I thought, "our next great adventure! I WILL BLOG SO MUCH."  But I'm stating the obvious when I say that it didn't really happen that way. And for two years, I haven't so much as thought about this blog, let alone posted anything.

Here I am, in late 2016, and I have had another baby and we are gearing up for our next, next adventure when we move to Lisbon, Portugal in 2017.

To further state the obvious, in the time since I lost track of this blog, our family has changed a lot and I have changed a lot as a person. For a while there, I thought that maybe I'd changed so much that it didn't really feel right to keep up this blog, that instead, maybe I should close the door on this particular platform.  But somehow that changed with baby #2, and I've found myself thinking of things I'd like to write about.

This past weekend, we returned to Shreveport for our ten-year college anniversary and I realized that even with *social media* it's so hard to keep up with people (I know what you ate for lunch and when your cat's birthday is, but I don't know what you do for a living or if you're really happy).  This year, both of Tim's grandmother's died, within weeks of each other and even though they had both been ill for a long time, it was shocking. Both of these women had been regular readers of this blog, and were endlessly supportive of my writing, even when I wasn't writing about things you normally tell your grandmother (or your husband's grandmother, for that matter).  Tim's Grandma Bonnie must have sensed that I was a little uncomfortable with the possibility that she might not approve of something I wrote or the way I wrote it, and she told me "I love reading your blog. Don't ever worry about what I think. Just be yourself."  If I hadn't written in a while, she'd ask when I was going to post again.

I wish now that I'd kept it up the past two years.  I know she and Tim's Nana Judy would have loved more than anything to read about our family and our lives, especially when they were sick, and we were so far away. So even though I've got less free time now than ever before (#workingmomoftwo) I'm going to give it the old college try. Talk to you again soon, old friend.