NEW NAME, NEW YOUTUBE CHANNEL

on the brooklyn bridge from a trip visiting my sister in summer of 2021

After many, many years as 'The Belletrist', we have entered a new era with a new name.  I can see from the blog archive that I started this blog back in 2008, apparently to transition from xanga (remember xanga!), and it all makes sense because I am a tried and true documentarian. I still have my heavy-handed journals from high school and college, which then turned into xanga entries (long-lost), and then here now on blogpost.  I see I wrote that first post on my birthday, which is also very much true to form: I get especially reflective and hopeful on my birthday. I must have been in England on my study abroad at Cambridge that summer, because I posted this entry a few days later. 

apple picking with 2 month old sloane

The Belletrist ended up being the place where I mostly documented the journey of becoming a mom. The bulk of my entries are from 2012-2017 during those early years of getting to know both my girls, and also myself as a mom. I was so grateful for this space.  Coincidentally, or maybe not, 2017 is when Ken and I started our podcast, Living With the Moons, which was very fun.  I think that's when we got hooked on working on creative projects together. We wrapped the podcast up in 2020, which is also when I stopped blogging almost completely.  

            

me in Niger February 2020

I had a lot of plans for 2020 - big plans - and I kicked it off with a work trip to Las Vegas and a trip to Niger, Africa. I came back from both trips pumped to put so many ideas into action. But as soon as I got back, the COVID-19 pandemic shut everything down, which required a lot of shifting of gears.  I continued to document on instagram (which is still fun, if not also somewhat insidious) about our year of homeschooling, skateboarding and tennis endeavors, and the books I've been reading (#booksatbeechwood). In 2021, we started hiking everywhere we could get on a weekend so we could be outside and explore, and we also added fishing and camping to the list of things we were all got excited about as a family. 

us in the Shenandoah Mountains fall of 2021

At the beginning of 2022, Ken and I toyed with the idea of starting our podcast up again, which didn't go anywhere. At the same time, I had been learning more about video as content (for work) and pitched Ken the idea of starting a Youtube channel to document all of our trips to state parks.  I do not watch Youtube videos, but I knew Ken did, and the more we brainstormed about it, the more feasible and fun the idea seemed to be - it was another way to document, but in video form! I have a goal for our family to visit as many Virginia state parks as possible (and hopefully some National parks too!) and while there is plenty of information on state parks out there, we think it could be even better.  We named our channel "Living With the Lus" - to echo "Living With the Moons", but instead of interviewing our friends, we would document our family's travels. I remembered I had this blog, updated the name, and here we are. 

Here's the screenshot of the Youtube channel: 

             

We filmed some of the parks we visited at the beginning of the year, but before posting any of those, we started our channel with our big trip of this year - our 3-week trip to South Korea.  If you go to Youtube, you can subscribe to the channel, and you can also go to @livingwiththelus on Instagram where we post every time we upload a new video. We started filming, editing and posting while we were in Korea and have continued since we've been back.  We have one more video to share about that trip, and once we're done, we'll start posting about some of our local state parks that we've visited recently. 

Here is the first of our Korea travel video here below; you can watch the rest of our videos on the channel!