Where I've Been

If you have been a loyal SunnyDays reader since I started this little blog back in 2011, thank you...and I'm sorry. Thank you for for your kind comments and encouragement over the years and I'm so sorry for the serious lack of posts and half-hearted "comebacks" over the last year. 

If you're new here, WELCOME! Feel free to stick around. So happy to have you.

Whether you are an old friend or a new one, I want to let you know what's been going on and what I hope for the future.

There are several reasons why I lost my blogging mojo. First of all, I think it's kind of inevitable to run out of ideas when you are blogging as a classroom teacher because many of us tend to revisit favorite ideas year after year. Yes, we may build on it, improve it, vary it in some way, but the general ideas are sometimes the same. After seven years of sharing a Pumpkin Investigation, it's hard to get up the gumption to write about it again. Of course most teachers do come up with new ideas and add fresh activities to our school year because standards and expectations are always changing. I just started to feel a little stagnant, as far as blogging goes. I hope this is coming across the way I mean it. I love teaching. I just don't love trying to make the same ideas sound fresh and new year after year.

Social media is another reason my actual blogging has been slacking. It's infinitely easier to snap a quick picture, dress it up, and voice text a comment for Instagram, as compared to taking and editing several pictures, linking and crediting sources, double checking media releases, and then writing something at least several paragraphs long to explain a project or activity. And I wonder if that also goes for blog readers? Are you still out there? Would you rather scroll through Instagram for a quick snapshot or do you still have the time and inclination to settle in and read a long blog post?

I've also been weary about turning my blog into a non-stop advertisement for my TpT products, but I really do use what I create in my classroom, so it almost becomes inevitable. And to me that feels a little disingenuous. However, TpT is something that I've poured my heart and soul into over the past 7 years. It's the business that has allowed me to help my family members who desperately needed us. It quite literally put a roof over our head when ours caved in. It keeps our 10 year old cars on the road safely and it's a large part of why I can still be a classroom teacher and haven't had to follow other better paying career opportunities. I honestly like to read other blogs that share how they use TpT products, so maybe that's not an issue. What do you think? I tend to way over-think these types of things, so maybe it's not as big an issue as I think.

Another reason is more serious and more personal. My father-in-law has been battling cancer since 2010. We had lots of ups and downs but for the most part, he faced his treatments with such bravery and courage. My husband and I live about ten minutes away from my in-laws and we are extremely close. Instead of calling a go-to couple to go out for dinner or spend the day together, we'd usually call them. We spent a lot of quality time together and a lot of time just doing mundane things together, like grocery shopping and helping them around the house.  Over the past year, his treatments started to help less and less and his pain started to increase. We spent so much time grabbing on to the times when he felt well enough to get out and enjoy life and then just being there when he didn't. We spent the last few weeks watching him rapidly decline and trying desperately to help. We stayed by his side and helped support my mother in law through his last weeks in hospice care. And we're now learning to navigate this new life without him. He wasn't "just" my father in law, he stepped into my life just as I lost my own father twenty-five years ago and we bonded instantly. All of our hearts are shattered, but we're trudging along as a family. Instead of letting grief swallow me, I'm making an effort to get back to the things that I once had such a passion for, including this blog and TpT.

So, where do we go from here? I have some ideas and a new direction for this blog that has been rolling around in my brain for quite a while.  I'll post that tomorrow because this is already a lot to digest.

Thanks for reading, thanks for following, thanks for being a friend.