What’s Next For This Website?

If you read my Should I Have My Gifted Child Tested? post, you know that we finally have a diagnosis for Caroline. Caroline has started with a specialist who will work with her on her weak areas and we are all very optimistic about where we are headed. I feel like we have answers, we have a plan, and we’ll start to see even more of a plan develop over the next few months with the specialist. Even though I don’t know how it will all work out, I’m not doing it alone any longer and I do believe a solid path for the future will become evident as we move forward, especially since we experienced such great success with OT for her dysgraphia.

That said, I’m struggling with where to go from here with that portion of my blogging. Many bloggers struggle with writing about their kids around the time they reach middle school. Kids become more private and have a right to tell their own story online when they are ready. As someone in a group said to me a few weeks ago, she got to the point where she realized her children’s story was no longer her story to tell.

I am also, to be perfectly frank, burned out on hard topics such as gifted/2e. Some people enjoy writing about gifted/2e. It is their passion and life mission. It is not mine. It’s something I’ve studied and explored because life necessitated it. But it isn’t where I want to live in my head all the time. I’m not interested in becoming a gifted/2e expert. I’m sure I will continue to write about children who learn differently, but it will never be the primary focus of what I do here.

So that’s kind of where I am with this site. I’m certainly not giving it up. I still love helping people find solutions to problems they face. Once I complete the next seven years of homeschooling, I’ll be able to write from the other side and I’m actually looking forward to being able to synthesize it all. I think that will be more helpful than anything. But I am trying to determine the best ways to help people now. What kinds of solutions can I offer and what is the best way to deliver them to my readers and people who find me via search engines and Pinterest?

The odd part is that our family is an outlier is so many ways. David is works at home so I don’t have the typical “mom homeschooling alone” problems to write about. We have one child, not multiple children at various ages and stages of development. We have never settled into anything remotely resembling a particular homeschooling “style” or approach. Because of Caroline’s particular strengths and weaknesses, writing about what we do and purchase really isn’t going to work. I also feel protective of her privacy. So I feel like I’m kind of in this odd situation and I’m not sure which way to move forward.

I still have many products in development. Many learning ideas to share. Books to share. Products to share. But I’m not sure which and how.

Last week I turned fifty. Like many people reaching a milestone, I spent a lot of time reflecting on my life up to this point, how I use my time and gifts, etc. I also started thinking about life after homeschooling. We have seven years left. When I think how quickly the past six years have flown by, I know that my homeschooling endeavors will be over before I know it. We have sacrificed a lot since becoming parents and now that we’ve come up for air a bit, David and I find ourselves thinking about the fact that retirement is way closer than we want to think about. We have a lot of ground to make up over the next fifteen to twenty years.

The work we do online whether it is this site or our business isn’t just a hobby or for fun. It’s our livelihood. So these are big questions I’m asking myself.

This website is a service I provide and I truly enjoy doing it. I am blessed by what I have grown here and the people I have met along the way. But it doesn’t feed me. It doesn’t reflect the things that I am most interested in as an individual. In fact, the topics that interested me the most and got me started in blogging were removed when I had to narrow the niche for this site to a homeschooling, learning, and parenting site.

Over the past couple of weeks, I resurrected my previous website (A Quiet Simple Life) that I started in 2005 under a different name. I cannot begin to express how much joy it has brought me to bring back those parts of my life that have been dormant for so many years.