Sometimes you need a change of scenery.

When my kids are at their absolute worst, I like to throw them in the car and head out for a hike. We have a trail just ten minutes from my house that’s perfect. Sometimes when we’re hiking, we see unbelievably long carp swimming in the stream under the bridge – apparently they bring luck. Other times we see toads hopping across the path, only to magically disappear against a rock. Swans often swim up close to us and wait for my kids to toss handfuls of food into the water. Chickadees and nuthatches will eat seeds right out of our hands – it’s like being in a Disney movie.

It doesn’t matter what mood we are in when we arrive – the quiet peace of the forest always brings us joy and we leave the trail in a much better state of mind.

Of course, there are other times when my kids are at their absolute worst and I just put on a movie. Then I lock myself in the bathroom with a bowl of heavenly hash ice cream and let the birds land on Snow White’s hands instead. After all, I’m not supermom.

Either way, sometimes we all need a change of scenery. And that’s how I feel about my blog right now. I need to shake things up.

Why? Because I’m not sure what Tea for Three is about any more. I used to write to promote babywearing. Then I wrote personal posts because I wanted people who shopped my babywearing store to know that I was a real person, not a faceless, feeling-less storefront. But now? I pretty much just write for the enjoyment of writing. In fact, I write lots of posts that I don’t publish because I don’t know if they “fit” my blog’s theme. Except that I don’t really have any overall theme.

I decided that I’d like a blog with a theme.

So allow me to introduce Unhurried Home, a blog about choosing a slower pace of life. For our family, that means homeschooling, cooking our own food, and (someday) growing our own food. It means focusing on handicrafts instead of insta-crafts that are finished in 20 minutes and then left to collect dust for 20 months before I toss them while my kids are out of the house. Ok, so maybe that’s not that different than Tea for Three,.

So how will the new blog be different?

1) For one thing, there will be less photos of my kids. Hardly any, in fact. As my children get older, I worry more about their privacy. Do I have the right to post their photos online for everyone to see? Is it fair to them to have their lives broadcast to the world? I decided that removing their photos from my blog would be a simple first step towards protecting and respecting them.

2) Next, I gave the kids new names, mostly because writing out The Princess and The Pixie is awkward. I also hate the baggage that comes with the word “Princess” – I’d hate for new readers to automatically picture my sweet seven year old as a spoiled, demanding child. I mean, it’s cute at three, but not so much at seven. So goodbye to The Princess, goodbye to The Pixie. Hello River, Harbour and Forest.

3) I also plan to write about homeschooling a lot more. Because homeschooling is our life and our life is wrapped up in homeschooling. Even if you don’t care about math curriculums and art programs, I hope that these posts will still be interesting. I mean, I know lots of people (aka my family) wonder what we do all day…

4) Finally, there will be more affiliate links. I’ve actually been doing some paid ghost writing for other bloggers lately, and I realized that if they’re making money off of my writing, then there is no reason that I can’t do the same, right? And have you seen the price of food lately? I figure that even a little bit of income helps. I hope the ads and affiliate links won’t scare you off though.

You might be wondering what will happen to Tea for Three. I had planned to leave it online, but after I moved over a bunch of the posts and removed a ton of the personal photos, the blog just wasn’t the same. So rather than abandoning a stripped down version of Tea for Three to collect cyber-dust, I’m in the process of copying all of my old posts and photos to my computer. I’m planning to format them nicely, print the pages off and then have them bound into a book. Doesn’t that sound lovely? I love the thought of physically holding all that work in my hands – something that I can treasure and even pass on to my kids when they have their first babies.

In the mean time, it will be good to have a book of memories – a book that I can flip through to remind myself why I signed up for this parenting gig in the first place. Maybe I’ll save it for the days when my kids are at their worst and I feel like I’m going to snap. Maybe it’ll be the book that I turn to when I’ve locked myself in a room with a bowl of heavenly hash ice cream while my children watch Snow White for the 87th time.