I think, I hope, you’re really going to like this post. Because when all the dust settles, we’re going to have a lot of fun here.

A few months ago, when we learned Stefan and Heather couldn’t return to Harvard this fall, we bought a duplex together. They’re still living in our basement, renting out the nice side through AirBnB while we remodel the worn out, run down side for them to move into eventually (and since I’ve already had requests to explain more about this, I promise another post about how we worked it all out).
After Stefan and Heather slaved for weeks over repairing the walls, sanding and painting (it’s a 100 year-old house and there’s a LOT to fix up), I offered to spend a Saturday helping Stefan put in a manufactured wood floor in the main rooms.





Honestly, we were lucky. We read the manual, everything went well and we felt like flooring experts. In fact we were so confident we said, “We’ll tile the bathroom next week! We’ll pull up the old tile on Thursday and put in the new on Saturday.”
Ha!
We tore up the floor (it was a 3 women, 2 man job) and found the subfloor had rotted away and beneath that, the floor joists had disintegrated. It was especially frightening right around the toilet. We imagined someone rushing into the toilet and falling into the basement– not fun!

So our one weekend project tiling the bathroom has stretched into nearly a month as we’ve learned new skills, bought new tools and worked around all the other demands of life.
And that’s kind of what’s happening here on the blog.
If you’re a longtime reader you may have noticed new buttons popping up, random reformatting and strange posts. I’m just doing some construction around here and I’ve had a LOT of rotted floor, missing joists moments.
Here’s what’s going on: I’ve moved all of our parenting courses onto the blog. In an effort to simplify and save money I hope to get back to the old, golden age of blogging we all love.
It’s this blog– this happy place– that inspired us to teach parenting courses, but in all the fuss of trying to make those courses work, I almost lost sight of what I do best: raise my beautiful family, take photos, share our ups and downs and what’s in my heart.

So I going back to that. And while I don’t know exactly how that will look, I feel so much peace about it.
In short, we’re just trying to make this a lot more fun. I have SO many good things to share.
See you soon!
xoxo, M
p.s. in addition to a duplex/remodeling post, I’m also going to write one on how to run a website on a shoestring budget because I can easily save you a small fortune.