Motherhood and Music: Long time, no post

Hellooooo! We're waving at you from the other side of the country.

My family moved to the Olympia, Washington area just after the holidays, and our lives are so drastically different than they were six months ago. Even though we have been looking forward to this move for a couple of years, we still miss D.C. and all the interesting and brilliant people we got to know there.

The last six months have been filled with questions... questions like:

Why did I think I could start blogging regularly right after having a new baby?

What am I really comfortable sharing with the world?

How do I overcome introversion and imposter syndrome when it comes to my tutorials?

Why is my 12-month-old still not sleeping more than 2-3 hours at a time?

Have I become too much of a big city person to be happy in a small city?

How do I narrow down my priorities so I can finally excel at something?
Will we decide to take my husband's career a different direction, or is what we have good enough?

How do I get back into the swing of extended-family relationships when I have lived far away for so long?
Why does the thought of buying a house make me feel like I'm dying a little inside?

These are BIG questions, my friends. And I have to say, I love the process of searching so much more than actual decision making. Still, I have learned a lot about myself as a mother, creator, and writer, and last year was a good experiment in figuring out the direction I want to take with this blog.

I also figured out why there aren't too many blogs like mine around. It's an insane amount of work! I'm a musician, not a designer, photographer or fashionista. There are so many challenges in trying to bring an aural art to a visual medium in a way that appeals to the blogging culture. I simply can't do it all, so I appreciate your patience with me as I keep learning.

Anyway, I'm excited to keep creating content and connect with more of you! I've got a singing tutorial series coming up with strategies for teaching yourself to sing in tune and what to expect from voice lessons. I also have a couple fun children's artists in queue, as well as some music I've written. I'd like to bring back Toddler Tip Tuesday with some tips from other bloggers (after all, I am now hitting the toddler stage for a second time and could use some reminders), maybe feature some other musical moms/families, and post on some of the questions I've received about children's musical development.

And now, let me introduce you to our new neck-of-the-woods. Since we knew Chris's job would give him the option of working from home at some point, deciding where to move was a long process involving a spreadsheet with cities on one side and categories across the top like cost of living, proximity to a zoo, educational opportunities, support for the arts, political balance, climate, nearby ballets/opera companies, easy airport access, taxes, etc. Eventually we crossed every place off the list that wasn't in the Pacific Northwest because we wanted to be within a day's drive of our family in Idaho and Oregon.

This is what we saw when we first visited Olympia last year.

I don't know if it was because we were used to seeing neoclassical architecture or what, but it seemed beautiful and familiar, and as we explored the town we felt like it gave us a lot of options for exploring the types of lifestyles we might want to settle into. Olympia is a beautiful small city right between two big cities, but it's far enough away to have its own identity.

The Puget Sound and Pacific Ocean are close by. Chris actually went shrimping over the weekend and then we ate the shrimp with salad from our plot in a community garden. Olympia is full of gardening enthusiasts, and I am learning a lot from them!