Welcome to The 2 Seasons lifestyle blog.
We are the mother/daughter duo, Janette and Jordan, and we have been writing this blog together for over nine years. We came up with the concept because I (Janette) live in Kentucky, and Jordan was living all the way up in northern New York when we started our collaboration. We had recently down-sized from the burbs to a beautiful townhouse in the city, and Jordan had moved into her first starter home, a charming 1928 bungalow. Four years ago Jordan and her husband moved to Charlotte, NC. Since then, they have adopted a little girl and a little boy from Thailand. She is known on the blog as Little Miss, and he is known as Google. Google has been home less than a year. Even though we are a six-hour car ride apart, it seems as if we are next door to one another. After all, Jordan once lived in Hawaii, which is six time zones away from Kentucky. We came up with our blog’s name because we are in two different seasons of our lives.
Decorating, crafting, doing budget makeovers, traveling, and gardening are activities we both have always enjoyed. We thought it would be fun to join Blogland and write about the things we love to do. Publishing a blog gives me the chance to use my journalism degree, and it’s a great way to keep us connected to each other.
JANETTE
I am an empty-nester and mother of two living with my husband in Lexington, KY. After living in our family home in the suburbs for 16 years, we decided to down-size to a great townhouse downtown. We went from 4,000 square feet to 3,000 square feet, a size we feel is plenty big enough for two. Since then, we bought a larger townhouse and have upsized. Downsizing isn’t for everyone!
When not working on house projects, I love to bicycle all over the world and here in the Bluegrass State, garden, read, work out, travel, and spend time with my family and girlfriends. I have bicycled across the United States and in various countries in southeast Asia, Africa and Europe.
I have been to 82 countries and territories and am working on my goal of at least 100. My college major was journalism, and I worked as a reporter for a daily newspaper after graduating. Eventually, I changed jobs and missed writing. That’s when Jordan suggested we write a blog together. I love writing this blog with my daughter. Even though we are 395 miles apart, it keeps us close and gives us another common bond.
We have had some amazing adventures together. A few years ago, Jordan left from the foot of the Eiffel Tower on her bicycle. I met up with her in southern Spain with my bicycle, and we pedaled through Morocco, Western Sahara, and Mauritania, to Dakar, Senegal. This included the Sahara Desert. We slept in tents for seven weeks and are two of the few American women who have done this. It was one of the scariest and most grueling things I have ever done, but boy, did I grow as a person.
We have both gone zip-lining through the tropical forests of Costa Rica and Laos as well as sky-diving. Together we have trekked to the rim of the world’s second largest volcano and have swum with hammerhead sharks, regular sharks, and sea turtles. I have climbed the Inca Trail to Macchu Picchu. We also have done our share of white-water rafting, and European bicycle trips together. Plus, Jordan loves kayaking and scuba diving.
We have built houses together in Romania for Habitat for Humanity. We headed up a group of friends who worked with single mothers in Cairo, Egypt to improve their living conditions in the slums of that city, and we led a group that built an addition to a school in an impoverished village in Laos. We have led volunteer vacations in Burma, India, Argentina, Cuba, Zambia, Colombia, Nicaragua and Peru. This 2020 project is in the Philippines, and it will be our 20th volunteer vacation. In addition to these working vacations with Jordan, I have headed up work projects with my husband in nine other third-world countries.
As far as the blog goes, we call it a lifestyle blog because we do a little bit of everything around here. We might write about redecorating a room, painting a piece of furniture we found on the side of the road, doing a project, traveling to Africa, creating or cooking a great recipe, or about the international adoption. We offer up a variety of topics, and we hope you will enjoy what you read here.
Photo by Eric Graf
JORDAN
I recently returned to the South with the man of my dreams. In 2016 we became parents to a sweet little girl we adopted from Thailand, and a little boy from Thailand last year. For five years we lived in Syracuse, NY, but my husband’s job made it possible for us to return to the south. Before moving to Syracuse, I had the opportunity to live all over the country and went to school in the South at the University of Georgia. Then wanting to try something completely different, I loaded up two suitcases and headed out to the west coast to live in San Francisco. After about two years in that city, I then packed my bags again and headed to the Islands and lived a couple of years in Hawaii where I met my husband. Our love brought us back to the mainland. We lived in Maine a while and then moved back to Atlanta.
My day job has me working on the redevelopment of industrial wastelands called brown fields, but when I not traveling for work, you can find me working on house projects. I love being outdoors, hiking, kayaking, biking – you name it. I enjoy entertaining, hosting theme parties, and spending time with my friends and family and of course, our children and our German short-haired pointer, Gracie. You can read about our adoption journey here.
I hope you enjoy our blog that I love writing with my mom. I will leave you with my favorite quote that I try to live by. It was written by Mark Twain. “Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.”
We have accumulated a boat-load of projects, recipes, household tips, budget furniture make-overs, decorating, and travel stories since we started this blog. We would love for you to spend some time browsing around our site. Better yet, we would love for you to become one of our regular readers. You can or subscribe to get our blog posts in your inbox Monday through Friday, or follow us on Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest.
To learn even more about us, you might enjoy reading this blog post we wrote about ourselves here.
