So I wanted to let you know what is going on behind the scenes. You can see a little of the front-facing changes, but not what David and I have been doing elsewhere.

For those who doubt because I’ve pivoted several times before but later changed my mind, let me fill you in on what has happened over the past ten days or so.  

• We deleted Sallie’s Rebuilding America, Thinking About Theology, and For the Love of Pansies from our server. They literally no longer exist.
• I deleted the associated MailerLite newsletter accounts and emails. They no longer exist.
• I’ve removed or deleted over 1,000 posts from this website. I moved most of them to my private off-site archive, but many of them were simply deleted.
• I removed the Forum and Telegram embeds (although my Telegram channels are still active if you are on Telegram – links in comments below). 
• I deleted my Buy Me a Coffee account.
• I remove the ads, although I did not delete my Adsense account. I sincerely hope to not use ads moving forward, but I did not completely remove that option. I find this aspect of working online the most challenging to deal with as I feel conflicted about hosting ads that don’t align with the values on my website but also desire the income.

That’s just a few of the things. So there’s no going back.

And I have no desire to do so. 

You might have seen the new tagline which gives you a glimpse of where I’m going. It is:

Build a family life of meaning, sovereignty, and faith outside the world’s templates

That reflects the life David and I have endeavored to live. That is what I hope to encourage others to do in the years ahead. 

For the past 20+ years I have been a writer who has been blogging. That has been mostly of necessity. I didn’t have the time or mental space to do much writing.

Now as I enter a different phase of life, I am moving from blogging and curating other people’s content to writing and featuring my own content and mentoring. 

I also didn’t believe I could write confidently about my homeschooling and parenting experiences, in particular. I know some homeschoolers and parents feel differently about this, but I didn’t honestly think I could write with authority about homeschooling and parenting my child to adulthood until I had actually completed the process.

Now that we are nearing the end of the process, I can look at the entire thing and feel comfortable saying, “This is what I did. This is what I learned. This is what worked. This is what didn’t work. This is what I would do differently. These are the excellent choices we made.” I can now write with freedom and confidence because I’ve basically finished the race. Not because I have a perfect child (because I don’t), but because I’ve endeavored to do my imperfect best to follow the Lord’s leading and do what she needed for the life God has ahead for her. 

So I’m restructuring the entire website. If you look at the dropdown categories in the sidebar, you can see that starting to come together. It’s not complete as I’m still deleting things and thinking through how different topics could be best organized. But I’m making progress.

The last thing I had to deal with was how to protect my content.

I mentioned the other day that I was working on another project. My project is about parenting daughters, especially those who don’t wish to pursue college. There is precious little out there, especially from a Christian perspective. What is available tends to be very patriarchal and we aren’t of that mindset. The other Christian content that is available (and isn’t college-focused) still centers on getting a job, building a “career” without going college, etc. What about young women who don’t tick any of those boxes? What would the Bible tell us about our responsibility to our adult daughters? Is it different than our responsibility to adult sons? If so, how and why? This is a need I would like to try to fill. 

I would like to write a short book on the topic, but I have no idea when I will have time to pull that all together. It will be at least another year. At the same time, I am eager to begin writing about these topics while they are fresh in my mind and we’re dealing with them in real time. 

However, there is no way I am going to start publishing content on this topic to have it scraped by search engine and AI bots every single hour. Over the past year, many other creative people have opted to do the only thing they can do when faced with this threat – put some of their best and most valuable content behind a paywall. I will likewise be putting some of my content behind a paywall. It is the only way to protect it moving forward. Some people use other platforms such as Substack and Buy Me a Coffee. I will be doing it right here. My goal is to have that set up in early December. 

So that’s the big picture. David and I have already picked out new colors, a new logo/header design, etc. We have a plan for the post images. I have a blueprint for the new website design and flow. We’ll be doing a lot of the structural and cosmetic over the next few weeks (as he has time around paying client projects). It could feasibly be done in a few days, but he can’t devote full days to it right now. So we’ll be rolling out the changes as he has time. The full amount of work with the navigation will take me a number of months to complete. I am hoping by spring to have everything the way I envision it.

So that’s the blueprint. I’m excited to start this new chapter.