New Beginnings with Old Roots

Last May, after a year hiatus, I returned to writing on this blog. I've really enjoyed it and I've learned that I want and need a place to write and grow and learn. I enjoy sharing it and getting feedback about it from everyone. However, I haven't been satisfied with the current state of this blog and I've decided that the start of a new year is a perfect time to refocus and redesign. It's time for me to take the next leap.

It's been five years since I started blogging and things have changed a lot. It began as a fun way to share little things about my life in New York with my family in Canada, like spotting a celebrity. When I started my own family it naturally became about pregnancy and babies and kids. Now, I want this to be more about me and my own journey as a creative person. The roots of this blog will not change, I am still a mother and I still live near NYC and I will be keeping some of the old content, but I want to take this in a new direction.

I've renamed the site and purchased a domain name and partnered with some advertisers. I have hopes that I can grow my audience and take this to a more professional level. I'd like to focus on my writing and photography and try to develop my storytelling. I'd like to do more video. I want to share stories that are not just mine. (Do you have any?) I want to attend conferences and be a bigger part of the blogging community, I want to grow as an individual and inspire others to do the same and I want to meet some Mighty Girls.

I've been working on it since the beginning of the year and it's nowhere close to being finished. I've decided on a platform, Squarespace, and I've got the essentials laid out but there is still so much more that I want to do and to be honest I'm struggling a little bit with how to do some of it. I can design a site, but I've never been very good at the building/coding part and so this is taking me some time. It's not like I have to do it from scratch, because of the service I am using, but I do need to learn some CSS and a bit of coding basics to really customize the site. I'm excited about where it's heading though and I can't wait to share it with all of you when it's ready!

In the meantime, things might be a bit quiet around here. I just can't focus on both writing posts and redesigning at the same time. So for now, there will be limited new content here, but rest assured that soon I will have a brand new site and lots of things to share. Are there particular things you would like to hear about from me? What have you enjoyed reading over the last few months? Please leave me a comment below!

For now, I will share a couple things in brief that have been brewing over the past weeks and are vaguely related. I hope to expand on them once the new site launches.

1. I took a challenge from my friend Nikki on Facebook, "Pay it Forward in 2011: I promise to send a handmade mystery item to the first five people who leave a comment here. They must, in turn, post this and send something they make to the first five people who comment on their status. The rules are that it must be handmade by you, and it must be sent to your five people sometime in 2011. " I got five comments and now I have to figure out what to make! I like to think of this as a "kick-in-the-pants" that I sometimes need to get busy with my plans. I've mentioned before that I want to learn how to paint/sew/knit so this is the perfect excuse (pressure?) I need to do something. If you are crafty, you should post this to your Facebook status or blog and do the same. 
2. I have begun communicating with a long lost half sister. This has been an experience unlike any other I have had and we are just at the beginning of getting to know each other. There are lots of layers and emotions, there are many people involved and she is a private person, so I don't know how much I will be able to share, but I have a feeling that this journey will be an interesting one.
3. I am very nostalgic lately, maybe it was the visit to The Farm or hearing from a sister I have never spoken to, but I started digging through all my old letters and keepsakes and just remembering things. I have a sand dollar from San Quintin, Baja, that someone I barely knew gave me almost 15 years ago. He passed it on to me with some wisdom that I have mostly forgotten, but I do remember that he said my power was seeing the truth. He also told me the Lakota story of the four directions. It's still filled with a tiny bit of sand, some of it had fallen out onto the tissue paper and it's simply beautiful. It sparkles and it looks just like what I imagine pixie dust looks like. There's magic in that sand dollar. I swear.