Fun fact: Wes and I took a little weekend getaway to Alderbrook Resort in mid January and as luck would have it, I just had just found out I was pregnant, so this photo will always have a special place in my heart.

So why did I take a little break from social media and blogging?

SURPRISE…I AM 12 WEEKS PREGNANT! This isn’t much of a surprise to me, as my husband I are were trying for baby #2, but for most of you who follow along, I haven’t really expressed my want for a bigger family. While we are elated, my body, on the other hand, had different thoughts. These past two months have been HARD. Okay, let me preface this with the fact that I feel extremely grateful that I can even carry this baby (because so many of my friends recently haven’t had this luxury) but man, I am zapped! That’s the only word I can think of to describe how I have been feeling. I remember being tired with Tayler the first time around, but I was also working full-time and didn’t have another child to chase around so the tiredness this time around is way different and so much worse.

Because of the pure exhaustion, I basically went into full-blown hibernation mode. I neglected the house projects I wanted to finish after moving back in, I become completely disengaged with the blog and social media and found myself watching endless hours of reality TV because it was literally the only thing I could bring myself to do. With that, brought on some extreme guilt. Guilt that I wasn’t taking care of my body (exercise had gone completely out the window), guilt that Tayler was at school yet I was at home being lazy instead of working, and guilt that I wasn’t being the best wife and mother that I could be. It also gave me a lot of time to reflect on this creative passion project of mine that is Styled Out West, and I even questioned weather or not I wanted to continue with the blog at all.

I always get kind of down in Jan/Feb - the weather here gets really depressing and don’t get me wrong, I am a Pacific Northwesterner at heart and really couldn’t imagine living anywhere else, but being pregnant, tired, and unable to drink away my surrows with wine has been rough. I have been in such a funk and what feels like a state of depression, that I haven’t been able to enjoy this pregnancy and just kept counting down the days until I could feel like myself again. Now that I am on the tail end of the first trimester I am feeling so much better (I will do a full blog post on my experience with the first trimester very soon, sharing more details) and getting really excited to start 2019 over because I feel as if the past two months didn’t even happen. We are also on day #5 of pure sunshine with not a cloud in the sky, and I literally think it’s bringing me back to life.

I still don’t know what my intentions are with Styled Out West or where I go from here. I know that with a new baby on board my priorities will once again change, but for now, what I do know is how much I still love this tiny square of the internet that get to call my own and don’t want to see it go anywhere. So for those of you who are still around and waiting anxiously for me to produce new content, I’m here to tell you that I want that just as much as you do! But instead of putting so much pressure on myself to produce so many times a week, I’m just going to do it when I feel like it. I think my best work comes when I’m really in the moment and writing from my heart and not just because I feel like I’m trying to please someone else. I recently got the most amazing advice about my blog that really got me thinking…”If you had no way of tracking your analytics or know if anyone was actually reading your blog, would you still write it? Would you write about the same topics? Would it still be a meaningful creative outlet for you?” This blew me away. It was such an easy concept but something I had totally forgotten as I got wrapped up in comparing myself to others based on viewer analytics and social media, etc. I want to get back to the basics and just write again. I don’t know if this outlet will ever be a real source of income (although I’m still hopeful that someday it will). And even if its not, I can proudly say that I have a journal of sorts that I can look back on in 20 years and be extremely proud of.

I can’t wait to share even more with you on our growing family of 4! And as I had time being lazy, I found previous blog posts that I wrote about my first pregnancy that I never published and can’t wait to re-share!

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