It’s been over a year and a half since my lost post.

I stopped writing for a few reasons.

The first was because I was busy. We traveled a lot in 2018, but we worked a lot too. My last post about our trip on the Kepler Track was written nearly a year after we had returned in April 2018. I was struggling to keep up.

The second was a little more complicated. I realized that families at the school that I taught at were finding this blog. Everyone was lovely about it, to be fair. But it felt a bit weird to me, knowing that those involved in my professional life had access to so much of my personal life. I guess it’s always been this way. But before my work and this blog were very much intertwined. Now I’m very careful to keep them separate. I have a lot I’d love to share (and do, with those closest to me) about my life in the classroom. But my teaching is very relationship-based. There are real privacy issues that come with sharing too much of that.

Whenever you put yourself out there – especially on the internet – you open yourself to criticism. People have read something I had written and misunderstood in the past. But the stakes seemed higher this time. I love that this blog preserves a formative time of my young adulthood. It is at times very honest and raw, and I’ve left it that way on purpose. But I’m not the same person I was in some of those past posts. I was afraid someone might read something and form an opinion on who I am now, without the context of the growth you don’t see on the blog. I was also afraid that if I kept writing, people would misunderstand my priorities. Professionally I did not think it was appropriate to write about my classroom here, but what if someone misunderstood that my only passion is travel? What if someone wrote me off because of content on this site? I was feeling anxious.

The third reason I stopped writing was because I got sick. Well, I got pregnant, to be more specific.

At the time I wrote my last post I would have been around 6 weeks along. It was right around then that the hyperemesis gravidarum set in. It stayed with me the entire pregnancy. It was hard enough making it to work and back. I had no energy for anything else.

And then the baby came. This last year has been a whirlwind.

Right around my son’s first birthday, I got a notification from WordPress. My url was expiring. Did I want to renew it?

Do I want to renew it?

My life is so, so different than the life chronicled here. But I’m still on the move – though in a different way. I still love to write. I feel that I still have stories to share. I almost didn’t do it. I almost archived this blog. It was my husband who ultimately talked me out of it.

My hope is that I can starting writing again during nap times. It may be another few weeks or months or years before the next post. But now, at least, you know where I went.