Have you ever been completely at a loss for words? Have you ever had to share something with someone and watched as they were shocked speechless? We seem to be experiencing a lot of both lately.

While my blog was “down,” so many of you asked if everything was okay around here. I know–I never really answered.

The truth is that no… it’s not all okay.

There isn’t an easy or pretty way to say it. And, honestly, my thinking is so muddled right now that I really shouldn’t try. But because I’ve invited you into my life, because you’ve shown such love and care through the bad and the good thus far, because many of you already were or have become true friends, because so many of you know the rest of my family outside of John, the boys and me, and because nothing I say from here on out will make much sense without knowing where it’s stemming from, you need to know the truth.

So I’ll let my mom tell it…. because the words are hers to tell. And she’s much more gracious than I’d like to be.

Pray for us. Pray for him. Pray for a miracle.

Yes. You are correct.

The blog has been broken.

It’s been over a month now since the day I started getting emails, texts, even calls… all wondering what happened to the ol’ blog.

And after all these weeks, I still have no idea what happened. My wonderful, amazing, talented friend Gretchen could explain it to you if you were curious, because she’s the mastermind behind the blog being back up and running. All I know is that it has something to do with IP addresses and A Records or Reports or something. Speak to me in some CSS and HTML and we’ll have ourselves a conversation, but you start talking domains and such and, people, I’m one lost little puppy.

All that to say that, yes, we now have a front page once again. There are still several glitches, the biggest one having to do with the URL itself–wherein the blog used to publish to heart-and-home.net (no “www.”) and ONLY that, it now is working with the “www.” but NOT without it. According to Miss-Genius-Domain-Problem-Solver-Gretchen, that is a good thing, because URL’s are supposed to use that “www.” (You want to know why? Ask her, not clueless me.) The bad news? It’s no longer works using the old without-”www.”-address. The good news? Gretchen thinks she can fix the problem.

Which, of course, all basically means that because the URL is still wonky, the feedreaders aren’t able to pick up this feed and according to Feedburner, there are a total of eight–EIGHT!–people who will be seeing this post. And several hundred who still think Heart and Home has ceased to exist altogether.

So to all EIGHT of you, don’t touch that dial–we’ll be back to regular programming shortly.

(Actually, let me rephrase that… “regular programming” such as we’re accustomed to HAS ceased to exist in my life during the time my blog was down. But the reason for that is more serious than the tone of this post allows to me be right now. So… more on that later.)

Cheerio, then, to you… and you… and you, you, you, you, and you… oh, and #8, you too.

ETA: Because Gretchen becomes even more amazing by the day, the blog is officially fixed. Clean bill of health. Good to go. She managed to fix the feed problems, the domain and URL issues, get everything in tip-top shape AND make it home in time to make dinner for her farmer husband and baby girl. So you should be seeing these posts in your feed readers now, all the links around here should be working again, and it no longer matters whether or not you use a “www.” in the URL.