We renewed our website, so we’re going to write more here - not that our lives are so exciting that we have pages to write, but because it’s fun and the internet needs places to go that aren’t selling you anything. We need spaces online created for connection and creativity. This is such a place.

We’ve had a busy year, with lots of travel and a move within Southern Oregon - we moved out of the apartment that was meant to be a temporary place for us to land while we looked for a house to buy/rent back when we moved here in 2019, but then the pandemic hit, and the fires ripped through the valley, taking with it any semblance of housing that might be affordable to a single-ish income house. We were thankful to have such a wonderful place to live for the past five year, while we weathered the pandemic and navigated life as a one income family, but this year we knew it was time to move into a new space, whatever that looked like. We moved into a three bedroom and are still renting from our amazing friends who owned the previous apartment. We are now closer to Max’s work, closer to the bike path, and we have a garage instead of a storage unit for our outdoor gear and bikes and such. We are still a one car family, but Max now only has a 7-mile bike commute to work instead of an 18 mile one, and we get to have more time together in the mornings and evenings.

Our kiddo started kindergarten so I am beginning my new career as car-mom, and so far on the way to school we get gorgeous views of the foothills, the vineyards, the pear orchards, sweet baby fawns, and even a ZEBRA. I also started a paid part-time job for a local coworking space as a support specialist, and continue to run my photography company as time allows. I was able to accompany Max on his work trip to New Zealand earlier this year, which was an absolute dream come true, and will have to be a post in and of itself, as there are too many photos to share here - but it was the longest we’ve been away from our kiddo, and he did great getting spoiled by family in Colorado while we were away for three weeks. He traveled back to Oregon with Max’s mom, and she supported us through our crazy move from Medford to Talent, and during her visit we even got to stay at an AirBnB on a working dairy farm after we moved out of the apartment, and before we could move into the new place.

Now that we are in Talent we have a third bedroom, with a real bed, so we no longer have to host guests with a five year old’s twin bed or our living room couch. We recently had Max’s aunt, uncle, and cousins visit from the east coast, celebrating our 9th wedding anniversary and seeing Twelfth Night at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, and my sister also came out from Colorado to visit for a week shortly after that. Unfortunately the week she came out our valley was filled with smoke from several fires burning nearby, and we didn’t get to see Gregory Alan Isakov at the Britt like we had planned - we did, however, still get to see a matinee of RENT at the OSF, and soak up lots of special seester/aunt time together.

The last days of summer were spent similarly to the last year - lots of trips to parks, disc golf, hiking, grocery shopping, making food for our family, watching Star Wars in the evenings - and we are finding a rhythm now that school has officially begun. We have weekly swim lessons and soccer practices, and when we moved into our new place we acquired a piano, so hopefully lessons are in the near future, too. I have a core group of lady friends who get together once a week (if possible) and jam out on our ukuleles, and I’m trying to take as many classes at Talent Maker City or any local art space as possible. I’m writing this from the coworking space I have access to as a perk of my job, and am enjoying being in the presence of adults for the majority of the day now.

Here are a few photos of life these days - I have about 130,000 to choose from on my phone, but I’m trying to be more intentional with my film photography these days, so I’ll try to share more of those here. As always, thanks for reading, and thanks for being here in this space of connection with us.