Things have been pretty quiet around here lately. Some of you have asked us if we fell off the face of the earth, so we thought we’d give everyone update on what we’ve been up to, along with our plans for the future.

To start off with, here are just a few of the things that we have been up to for the last 4 months.

We went to Minneapolis for a mini-vacation.

We discovered Jovie likes to build her own sandwiches with her food.

We catered a wedding.

We discovered how Gavin really feels about cake.

We stood in awe of the penne pasta we cooked that somehow ended up looking like this.

We found out Jovie was trying to sneak Dove chocolates, but neglected to take off the wrapper first.

We had a serious discussion about our finances.

We celebrated Marley’s 6th birthday.

We had an Avengers tea party.

Marley had her first day of kindergarten.

Gavin had his first day of preschool.

Jovie found random spots in the living room to watch TV.

We dug up a late 80′s Lego set and put it together.

We went to an apple orchard.

We played games.

We stocked up on candy during Halloween.

We celebrated Jovie’s 2nd birthday.

We decided to start on holiday food early.

Last, but certainly not least – we experienced one of the coolest nights of our lives. Our church, Two Rivers, decided to have worship in a barn. Since we lead worship for our church, we spent a good amount of time preparing for the night. This night was so incredibly cool! We even busted out some bluegrass!

Now then…on to our plans for the future of 1 Cup Awesome.

Last December, we considered walking away from 1 Cup Awesome for good, even though it had only been around for about nine months. However, we found a renewed energy for the blog and decided to keep posting. That energy didn’t last long.

After much thought and discussion, we have decided to stop posting on 1 Cup Awesome for the foreseeable future. We will keep the website running, mostly because we reference it for our own recipes on a regular basis. We also want to keep the option open for us to return to posting in the future if our schedules allow. But for this current season of our lives, we need to walk away. Keeping up with new posts on 1 Cup Awesome was taking time away from the things that were most important to us: our relationships within our family and our church.

What you see in one of our blog posts is a nicely presented meal with some neatly crafted words and pictures.

What you don’t see is that our family meal time is delayed because we have to get pictures of everything we are making.

You don’t see that our kids are cranky and ready for food.

You don’t see that we feed them first to keep them happy while we finish up taking pictures and we miss out on a meal together.

You don’t see that we are so worn out from our day and from making sure everything is perfect for a blog post that we don’t even enjoy our meal together.

You don’t see that instead of spending time relaxing with each other at night, we are writing up recipes to have ready to post for the next morning.

You don’t see that what we really want to be doing is writing and working on music for our church to sing together (our true passion).

Here’s the deal. Keeping a food blog is a ton of work. For those that have one, you know this to be true. Keeping a food blog when you have three kids under the age of six and are making a concentrated effort to invest in your church is even harder. We had to say “no” to something in our lives. When we laid everything out, our blog was the least important to us personally. So we are saying “no” to 1 Cup Awesome so that we can say “yes” to everything else.

Don’t get us wrong, we still love cooking and eating awesome food. We have had some AMAZING food over the last few months. We also loved interacting with all of you! We were always so amazed and honored when you would let us know that you decided to make one of our meals and you or your kids loved it. That was, by far, the greatest part of 1 Cup Awesome.

So long for now!

Keep loving people. Keep cooking them tasty food.