from the launching pad

Do you look over your blog, much?
I don't, usually.
Maybe it's because I'm more of a "here and now" and "what's next?" kind of girl.
(Hmmm... maybe that explains my poor sense of time, too-- and why I have this record for my children?)

But the last little while I've been looking over pages (and pages and pages)... yesterday I edited over a year's worth of notes - which was a little over five hundred posts.

Five hundred days of deliciousness.
Five hundred days of splashes and cupcakes and feeding birds and jumping and painting and adventuring and fishing and moose and tea parties and computer games and lizards and roadtrips and bubbles and rainbows and measuring and gardening and butterfly chases and loving....
Five hundred pages of life magic.

I can't help but feel..... oh!, so many wonderful things. I feel so blessed, and I feel so in love, and I am so happy with this beautiful life.
And it is such a wondrous and humbling feeling to have people to share it with.

Connecting with others in this way is so amazing.... it's remarkable that we get to laugh and cry with each other... to create and share ideas... to shout in frustration and have a friend to lean on from over two thousand miles away.
Honestly, it just makes me want to cry to think about it.
Who would have thought that one (and an introverted, borderline hermitic One, at that :) ) could find such an amazing community that feels as intimate as anything over a cup of spicy tea on a cold and dark afternoon?
Blessed, I tell you.

On to it, I guess.
I've been thinking about these pages for a while.
Nine months ago I bought the domain ordinarylifemagic.com. It was when I ran out of space for pictures... I thought at that time that I may want to move this blog there.
I figured I might have everything in the same relative spot... olm and happy and free, lists of our bloggy friends, a few resources, whatever I liked.
The last few weeks I've been thinking about this blog - which is first and foremost a record of the magic of our family's life - and an appreciation of that life - for my children.
As I've put in tutorials (because they're fun :) ) and other things... and as I've had a couple of people send me notes asking if I would review products for them in the last couple of weeks... I've decided that it's time.

I wasn't sure of the format it would take, at first, and I wasn't sure if I wanted "blog", or "website", but I've chosen blog.

It isn't perfect (or even very near where I want it, yet), but it's started. (Have I mentioned lately how complex Wordpress is? A self-given crash course-- in html! >:/ )
I'm leaving lots of room for expansion and growth - already it has taken on bits of what it wants to be - but I expect that will evolve, still.

So!
The everyday OLM stays here. The living and laughing and learning and loving.

The how-we-did-it 's will live at olm.com. (Well - ordinarlylifemagic.com)
In hopes of aiding it in developing its own style, there will also be snippets from me as I see fit.
In the name of "why not?" and contributing to my family's coffers, I'll be accepting sponsors for giveaways, doing (unpaid) reviews for products that are relevant to our life or learning, and I will also gladly host friendly ads in the sidebar. (I expect this could take a couple of years? I really don't know.)

In addition to our tutorials, we'll put our Interesting Places there - places we go or travel to that other families might be interested in, should they live or travel this way. We'll have lists of favorite books, websites, and online shops. Games we play and make up, recipes, and other such "how" 's will also find a home there.

Because we are a family living and learning in this world, and because the focus of olm.com will be education - discovering and creating - we'll also post especially beautiful days that were written of here over there.
Not many, mind you... just those sorts of days you know you'll always remember - the ones that are filled with the reasons why we do it all in the first place.

It will take me some time (oof) before all of the links are connected inside .com instead of to back here, and as I had to load a over a thousand posts into wordpress, I'm still deleting posts that don't belong there.
So organization isn't optimal, at the moment. :/
But I've got to start somewhere... and we have two projects that we've worked on that need to be posted-- so there you have it. :)
'Tis begun.

I'm really happy about this project (even when I'm cursing it), and am so excited to see its Becoming.
Hope to see you sometimes on the other side.
Love, Steph