Making fresh starts, transitions, and new beginnings

I know, I have been a bit M.I.A since returning from the Blogher 17 conference in April, but so much has been going on behind the scenes. August is shaping up to be a month of many changes and new beginnings for my family, myself, and my blog. What new beginnings you ask … well, let’s see …

The blog is getting an overhaul and being re-branded to Socially Acquainted. I just feel this better embodies what I’m trying to do with the blog and I love the play on words as I’m not only acquainting you with myself, my family, my life, and things we love in a social setting, I’m also using social media to acquaint you further with the usage of photographs and quick snippets. Over the next few weeks our social handles, email, and finally website will transition over to the Socially Acquainted moniker and have more of a magazine type look.

They say people create what they don’t see and when I started the blog, I didn’t really know what direction I wanted to go in, just that it would have a motherhood lifestyle focus, but as I continued on in my writing I noticed not only were my sharings not predominately motherhood focused, I also noticed the lack of tween and teen focused writings in the motherhood blog spectrum. Socially Acquainted will include more co-parenting post from a tween/teen mom perspective. It will also go from more of a “me” to a “we” with you seeing more of the kids voices through first person articles written by them as well as seeing them in more video content.

Speaking of the kids, this will be my baby boys first year of high school … eek! I’m so nervous and excited for him as he takes on this new adventure, but it also means he will be going to live with his father full time as he transitions into a man. The children’s father, from here on out known as “M”, and I started out doing a bit of a week on week off alternation, then moved to me having the kids the vast majority of the time when I moved to Fort Mill to give them a better school district to attend, so this is a HUGE transition for me as well and I have no idea how this new dynamic will change things. They’re not far away of course, only about 40 minutes, but still a big change when I’m used to having him pretty much everyday. This will also mean him and V won’t see each other much, with it dwindling down to just the weekends … maybe it will lead to them appreciating their time together more, who knows.

Last, but certainly not least, Nathan and I have entered the cohabitation portion of our relationship, which is always exciting. Actually, let me roll that back … we did a bit of a “trial” living over the summer to see how we all meshed together and to kind of tiptoe into what living together would be like. It was only a portion of the picture because M and I go back to alternating weeks with the kids during the summer, so we had the luxury of “off” weeks where we got copious amounts of time together for days on end … that ends in 2 weeks when school starts back. Once school starts back, we’ll go to only having 4 childless days a month, so look for snippets of those rare date nights to make appearances on Instagram as well as a few relationship post sprinkled in here and there.

We were both renting, with my lease running out right before the summer and his running out this month, so we’re going to spend the next couple of months doing a short term, yet longer term, Air BnB house rental, while we search for a permanent home to call our very own. Fort Mill is growing exponentially right now, so there are quiet a few places to choose from once you narrow down your price range. V did an Interior Design camp over the summer, so she’s excited to start picking out some things to put those skills to the test.

If you’ve got any big changes coming up this autumn, have done a long term Air BnB rental, or have turned the reigns over to the other parent to assist in molding your child into a man, I’d love to hear about them below!