Hello, lovely.

Two months in.

I’m quietly waiting for the moment where it clicks, where D.C. stops feeling like a place I am getting to know and starts feeling like the place I live. And then I remember that I have done this before. Fort Collins to Denver took a solid year before I felt established, primarily through work and the friendships that came with it. Denver to Scottsdale, then a layoff six weeks in and debilitating chronic migraines six months after that, it was well over a year before Arizona felt like home. Phoenix to Prescott was different, more of a cocoon than a settling, Rob and I incubating together, getting quiet, getting clear, getting engaged, getting married. We ended up not really trying to put down roots there. We were unknowingly preparing for something.

And now here. Two months into our first eighteen-month lease and I know, from experience, that it always takes longer than you think it will. I also know that we arrived here with different energy and different purpose than any move before. So I give us credit. We are in process, and I’m loving it.

The finish line, when I actually let myself name it, is not dramatic. It is our home in order, the last of the nesting done, Rob’s office comfortable and functional, a daily rhythm I can feel good about in these final eight to ten weeks of pregnancy. Movement, rest, learning, the projects I want to have in a good place before I put everything down and walk fully into motherhood. And connection, the slow, real kind, with the few women I have started to meet here, while keeping the thread alive with my people across the country. That is what settled looks like to me right now. We are closer than I sometimes can see.

I have met three pregnant women in two months. One at mass, whose life feels like a parallel version of ours, married in December, due in September, the kind of conversation where you walk away thinking I think we are going to be friends. One on our front patio on a sunny afternoon, Axel being the social catalyst he always is, she was walking by and stopped to say hello to him and somehow a few exchanged sentences turned into a connection I am hoping to sit down over coffee with soon. And one at the Eastern Market on Mother’s Day.

That morning, I had every intention of wearing a yellow sundress I had been saving since the move, the one I had promised myself I would wear in the DC spring and look adorable in with my pregnant belly. It did not zip halfway up. Neither did the next three outfits. Eventually, I surrendered to my single pair of maternity jeans and a blue tank top, which, for the record, still looked cute. We walked through the market and I noticed her, maternity jeans, hand in hand with her husband, a bouquet of pink flowers. We smiled at each other the way pregnant women sometimes do, a glance of recognition, and kept walking. Then I felt a tap on my shoulder. She had turned around to ask about my jeans.

The four of us stood there in the middle of the market, plus Axel, and talked. We made plans for the following Saturday. When I journaled my gratitudes at the end of that night, I wrote that I was grateful nothing else fit and that I was wearing exactly what I needed to be wearing to meet them. We spent a couple of hours with them over the weekend. They taught us a new card game and I am ordering us a deck this week.

This city is making friends for us in the most ordinary moments. I am paying attention.

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Last week we attended our first conference here, a two-day gathering of close to four hundred people, values aligned, passionate, from all over the country. The kind of room where the conversations in the hallways are as substantive as the ones on the stage. We were invited by a friend of Rob’s whose work sits at the intersection of law, oversight, and civic life, the kind of person whose invitation you say yes to without needing the full details first. Both days ran ten to ten, sessions and meals and conversations stacked end to end. I learned things I would have only grazed the surface of on my own.

On the first day during introductions, Rob introduced us and said, “this is Alexus, my beautiful pregnant wife.” He says it that way often, on his show, but in rooms like this one, it was extra special. Every time I hear it, I just love and revel in how excited he is. I love how beautiful he sees me as I grow our baby. It also opened the door to conversations throughout both days, well wishes for our approaching birth, warmth from strangers who became a little less strange by the end of it. I walked away with a lunch date scheduled with a woman after her mother connected us via text at the event. Two strangers deciding the other one was worth knowing.

On the second afternoon Rob and I slipped out during a breakout session and found a quiet corner. We had been talking about vision planning and what we are building toward, and somehow in that stolen hour it came alive in a way our previous conversations had not quite reached. We talked about what we want our life to feel like, not just in three years but in the season before the next big vision, the one we are actively building now. I shared that I think of it as preparing ourselves so completely, so intentionally, that when the time comes to step into the grander version we can do it wholeheartedly, mind, body, and heart, nothing left unfinished, nothing dragged along. Rob and I both hold freedom as our highest value. The how and where and when of it we are happy to surrender. We know what we are moving toward even when we cannot see the exact shape of it yet.

This is new for me, or newer. Since 2022, I have practiced what I call directional surrender, knowing generally what I want and staying open to how it arrives. It has never felt more natural than it does right now, which is its own kind of personal progress.

Somewhere in the middle of all of this, our birth team is complete. Midwifery clinic, doula, hypnobirthing coach, and a plan for a home birth that feels more right every week. We are two sessions into hypnobirthing and I am learning things that feel totally aligned with my studies and understandings before pregnancy. I have started turning my attention toward postpartum too, which is its own kind of preparation I did not expect to find so fascinating. There is something remarkable about growing a human being entirely without effort while simultaneously having so much to learn about how to receive and care for the one who is coming.

Over the weekend we took our thirty-week bump photo. We attended an infant CPR class. Rob moved the furniture out of the nursery and set up the guest room in the basement, all of it after a full conference week and a social Saturday. He inspires me every single day. He also reminds me, without always saying it directly, that my job right now is to soften. To relax. To calm. I do not always have to go as hard as he does. That is its own kind of gift.

Today I am driving to the airport to pick up my mom. By the time you read this, she will already be here.

I have been holding this pregnancy close. Sharing selectively, even with family, partly out of a desire to just experience it, to let it be mine and Rob’s before it belongs to the world. I grew up geographically close with my parents and my grandparents. This distance is a different kind of life, one I chose and one I love, and it also means that seeing my mom has happened in glimpses. January at our reception in Arizona. A quick stop in March, less than twelve hours, before we hit the road for DC. And now, seven months in, she is coming here.

She told me a few weeks ago that she had watched a grandmother put her grandbaby into a car seat, one of those ordinary handoff moments, and thought, I am not really going to get to do that. She did not say it with sadness exactly. Just with the quiet recognition that our life looks different than that. And when she said it, I felt the full weight of what this visit means.

It does not matter what we do while she is here. It never does with her. We could sit on the couch and watch television. We could find somewhere to watch the sunrise. We could do nothing at all. The point is she will get to see me thirty weeks and some days pregnant, in our new home, in this new city, in this new season of my life.

I cannot wait to open the door.

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Hello, lovely.

It has been three weeks.

That is the only way I know how to start this, because three weeks in a new city feels like both a blink of an eye and a very long time, depending on the hour or day you ask me.

We arrived in Washington, D.C. on March 22nd, and since then, life has had this particular quality I can only describe as the pause between contractions. I have never actually experienced a contraction, yet, so I am borrowing the image on faith, and it feels right. Big thing, then breath, then the quiet knowing that another big thing is coming, and the next big thing. Week one, our pods had not arrived yet. The historic row house was half-assembled. I was in a holding pattern that was, surprisingly, kind of peaceful.

The night we pulled in, the first thing I felt was a complex wave of emotions that burst out of my eyeballs. Over the next two days, coming off the wave of probably adrenaline, the hard work of packing and coordinating, and anticipation wrapped up in the first half of this move, I realized I was feeling a combination of relief and the anticipation of all the work still to come. Walking around our new home that first night and realizing we have way too much stuff and it’s not all going to fit meant more sorting and donating ahead, not just unpacking and finding places for things as we had planned. Once that passed, something close to stillness. Then, slowly, the small pleasures started arriving the way they always do when you stop rushing and just let a place show itself to you.

There is a cafe around the corner from our house, and I have been sitting at it in leggings and a hoodie, watching women walk by who look like they belong in a magazine. Capitol Hill has a particular kind of woman in it. Tailored. Intentional. Effortlessly put together in a way that reads like she has somewhere important to be and also knows exactly who she is. As I take it all in, something tells me that some are just in seasons of my past lives, figuring it out as she goes, maybe this life is the exact fit for her, and maybe she just hasn’t had her awakening yet. I have been watching them with complete admiration and zero self-consciousness. I am barefaced, underdressed, and five months pregnant, and I have not minded one bit.

Here is what I know: I came here to expand. When I moved to Arizona, I found clothes that matched the version of me I was stepping into. It happened almost naturally. I will do that again here. There is a wardrobe waiting for me on the other side of this baby, one that belongs to whoever I am becoming in this city. For now, I am in the in-between, and the leggings are doing their job.

Week two, we went to Palm Sunday mass at the church around the corner. Axel has already met more dogs here than he did in months in Prescott, our location obviously being the catalyst there. My first drive in the city was to Reagan National Airport to pick up my mother-in-law, who flew in to help us unpack. I took one wrong turn and got a small scenic detour through the neighborhoods of Arlington. I did not mind. The afternoon was lovely and I found my way. I have overheard conversations at coffee shops about the Washington Post’s leadership, about a nonprofit changing hands, about families visiting families. The ordinary interior life of a city doing what cities do.

The pods arrived in week two. Four of them. The movers first had to be convinced that yes, their truck and trailer would fit into the one-way-in, one-way-out alley behind our house, which took some negotiating before anyone moved an inch. Once that was settled, my job, per doctor’s orders, was supervising. Directing traffic. Pointing at rooms. I will say that I was very good at this, and I will also say that throughout the entire move, some boxes were lifted by me that were not supervised by anyone but me. I’m pregnant, not disabled.

There was a gap between the first two pods and the second two, an hour and a half of alley, clear and quiet. I sat on the front patio with Axel while my mother-in-law unpacked the kitchen and Rob and the movers worked through the second round. A neighbor came by walking her dog. I know the dog’s name. I will eventually learn hers.

She stopped and asked, fairly directly, whether we were moving things in and out. I explained it was just our delivery. She let me know the alley shouldn’t be blocked all day, that usually neighbors let each other know about these things, and that she had a contractor coming tomorrow. I let her know they would be long gone by tomorrow. She said again, usually we just let each other know. I said, absolutely. She kept walking.

I sat with that for a second. The alley had been clear all morning, for an hour and a half between deliveries, and they were nearly done. I don’t know which door is hers. And somewhere in the back of my mind, a small voice noted that a hello might have been a nice place to start.

But I get it. Dense spaces require a kind of negotiation that sprawling ones don’t. Everyone is closer to everyone else’s business, literally, and people develop their own systems for protecting their piece of it. There is actually a whole NLP conversation to be had about what happens when two people’s maps of a shared space don’t match, but that is a different post. For now, I will just say: if you are moving to D.C., or any urban area, and you have an alley, notify your neighbors. Consider this your PSA.

And then there are the trees.

For the first week, I walked past them every morning. Clusters of pink and white blooms so dense they looked like something out of a painting. I had a hunch about what they were, but I did not stop to ask anyone or look anything up. I just looked. I let them be beautiful without needing to name them.

It was only when someone in Rob’s community posted photos that I put it together: I had been walking past the cherry blossoms. The ones people fly in from across the country to see. The ones I had been passing in leggings and a hoodie with Axel, unhurried, unaware, and completely lucky.

They are faded now. I wish I had taken more pictures. But I want to hold onto something about the not knowing, about soaking in the beauty before it had a name or a significance. That might be the most D.C. thing that has happened to me so far: accidentally witnessing something remarkable while simply going about my morning.

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What I did not expect was how much Rob would make sure we actually experienced the city while we were still finding our footing in it. While my mother-in-law was here, he booked us an afternoon river cruise to see the cherry blossoms from the water. And on her last day, the three of us walked around the Supreme Court building, which I did not even know was something you could just do, went back to a restaurant we had already loved, and made our way over to the Jefferson Memorial to see the blossoms there before she flew home.

My first instinct each time was that we were spending precious hours we could have been unpacking. And each time, we came back and got more done than we would have otherwise. It turns out adventure breaks are productive. I was so grateful to him for making those outings a priority when I would not have given myself permission to.

In the middle of all the boxes and the logistics and the figuring out where things go, a woman from Rob’s community sent two gift boxes. The first was baked apple strudel, three long, beautiful loaves of it, which my mother-in-law declared delicious. The second was a baby basket. Baby clothes, a soothing bear, a bag for Axel, and a card so thoughtful it stopped me where I sat.

I teared up. Right there among the boxes.

Through my watery eyes, something surfaced that I had been carrying quietly since we got here, maybe longer. A worry that this pregnancy has been an afterthought. Not because I don’t love this baby, but because the first two trimesters have been so consumed with getting things in order, with the move and the logistics and the building of a life in a new place, that I have not let myself fully turn toward what is actually happening. I have not thought about the nursery. I am amazed every day at my body. And still I wonder if I have not let myself fully sink into the wonder of it. There has always been something more urgent.

That gift box cracked something open. A reminder, arriving in the form of someone else’s generosity, that this baby is already here. Already becoming the most important thing. And I want to make sure these last months feel that way, not just in theory but in how I actually spend my attention and my presence.

Week three arrived with ambition. I had a list in my head of what would be done, what would be sorted, what would finally feel settled. Monday and Tuesday were productive. Wednesday, I felt the first whisper of a head cold moving in, so I took it easy and saved my energy for our new OB appointment. The doctor was thorough, and the metro ride over was easy and surprisingly affordable in a way that keeps pleasantly surprising me. They wanted to see us back the following day for their own anatomy ultrasound; apparently, my full records didn’t make the trip over when we transferred care. A bonus and a mild inconvenience at once. We got to see our baby again, which I cannot be fully annoyed about, even if my original plan for the day involved pajamas and unpacking boxes.

I am also not entirely convinced this is the right practice for us. So I am keeping my options open and planning to check out another office before we settle in. Finding the right care for this last stretch matters, you have to be willing to do a little more looking before you find what fits.

Tuesday night, before the cold came and before the doctor visit, we went to a book launch lecture across the city. The event was excellent. We took the metro over, which was easy and, again, remarkably affordable. We met a few people. Afterward, we had dinner at a restaurant across the street, hearty and warm and exactly what was needed. Rob was starving in the way that happens when you have not quite found your food rhythm in a new place yet.

At some point during dinner, he said, “Instead of dinner and a movie, we have lectures and dinner.”

I just love that so much.

After dinner, we took an Uber home through quieter roads, though still people out and about at 9:30, which gave the subtle impression that the city does not fully go to sleep. Rob had his map pulled up, and every time we slowed or stopped, I could see him zooming in to find out what we were passing. I love this about him. I was just looking out the window, taking it in.

We went right through the Mall. The Capitol lit up on our left. The Washington Monument illuminated on our right. I tapped him to make sure he saw it. He said,

It is. And I hope we never stop thinking so.

Thursday, I took a two-hour nap that was so needed. Friday, I crushed the day. Unpacking, sorting, and separating what was going on the donation truck. Still blowing my nose, but with the deadline approaching, there was no choice but to get things done. I even snuck away for an hour at the park with Axel, throwing the ball, working on some training I have let slide, sitting in the sun. That hour felt like a full exhale.

Friday night, a longtime mentor of mine was passing through town, and I got to spend an hour with him. One of the unexpected gifts of moving to this side of the country is that different people are just closer now. Followed by our traditional Friday night pizza. We have not found a place on Capitol Hill that makes the dough the way we like it yet, but we have found and frequented the pizza shop two blocks from our house. That first bite always hits exactly the way it is supposed to.

Saturday morning, I moved slowly and let myself. I am learning, really learning, that nothing is a rush unless I make it that way. In this season, I do not have to hurry through anything. So I sat with Axel for most of the morning and did some writing. Then we got into action. We went through the last of the boxes, moved everything going out to the concrete parking pad at the back of the house so when the two-man junk team arrived all they had to do was load it up. I liked this company because they donate to Habitat for Humanity first, recycle what they can, and only send to the dump what is left. We filled about four-fifths of their truck.

Rob and I talked about it afterward. With everything we have had to let go of since arriving we estimate we could have reduced that initial move from four pods to two. There are things we wish we had kept. There is plenty we brought that had to be rehomed. He just smiled and shook his head. “We did the best we could. We didn’t know.”

That’s it. That’s the whole thing.

After the truck left, I took a walk with Axel. Two blocks away, the Cherry Blossom Parade had been going all morning. We walked past the front of the Capitol, music drifting over from the Mall, food trucks lined up in the distance. I mentally bookmarked the whole scene for next year. We will participate in that. I am sure of it.

Sunday, we went to the Eastern Market and found a dresser and an open shelving unit we had spotted on our first weekend. We paid for them and told the gentleman we would be back after breakfast to load them up. I had my heart set on a cinnamon roll from the breakfast spot on 8th Street we had visited our first weekend. I don’t think I have had many real cravings during this pregnancy, but once I have something once and it is that good, I want it again. That was this cinnamon roll.

The host told us forty-five minutes. Rob asked if that was what I wanted to do. I suggested he go get the car, load the furniture, and come back to meet me while I waited for the table. In reflection, I would describe this as possibly the most pregnant decision I have made so far. Five minutes in, I was walking up and down the block past restaurants we could have already been seated at. Thirty minutes in, I called my mom to confess how silly I felt. She reminded me I knew what I wanted. She was right. She passed the time with me and somewhere around forty-five minutes, Rob texted that he was on his way back. I checked the app. We were number six. A patio two-top had just opened up and some very optimistic walk-ins were eyeing it. This mama was ready for her cinnamon roll and was not above walking directly to the host stand to confirm that table was ours. It was.

We came home, got the furniture in, swept and vacuumed, and wiped things down. Rob brought the shelving unit in on his own. We moved the kitchen dresser in together. When I was done, Rob said, “You crushed that.” I thanked him, and then I took a nearly two-hour nap. Early on in my pregnancy, I read somewhere that napping was positively correlated with full-term babies so I enjoy every single one.

That evening, we took Axel to the park together, Rob throwing the ball while I just sat there soaking up being with both of them. This is its own kind of full.

Three weeks in and we are 80 to 85 percent of the way home. Next week we leave for a vacation with Rob’s family and we would really like to be 99 percent done before we go, so that when we come back in early May we can put our full attention on what matters most. Baby prep in all its forms. Writing. And a little building project that has been forming in my mind this weekend, more on that soon.

Where your focus goes, your energy flows. Mine is finally, fully, turning toward what is next.

In three weeks, we have settled in faster than in the first month and a half in Prescott. Smaller spaces and a different season of life will do that. There is nowhere to hide from the work, and it turns out that is not always a bad thing.

The wonder is still intact. I plan to keep it that way.

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I’m writing this from the bay window in our Washington, D.C. row house, watching the rain blur the lines of a city I’m still learning to name.

We arrived ten days ago.

In the last six months, I’ve gotten married, found out I’m pregnant with our first baby, packed up a life in Arizona, and moved across the country to a city I’d visited exactly once. Our U-Haul Pods haven’t even arrived yet. I'm writing this surrounded by what we could carry in the car, in a furnished home that doesn't quite feel like ours yet, on the cusp of a whole new life.

And somewhere in the middle of all of that, I kept thinking: I want a place to write this. Not after. Not once it’s all figured out. Now.

I’ve been here before, in a different way. I’ve started over more than once. Fort Collins to Denver in 2018, the first time I left the version of myself I was raised to be. Then again in 2020. Then, in 2022, my first solo out-of-state move, which turned out to be the chapter where everything accelerated. Where debilitating chronic migraines cracked me open to the modalities that changed my relationship with my own body. Where I became a Master Practitioner of NLP, MER®, and Hypnotherapy. Where I wrote a book. Where I met the person I’d spend my life with.

Every time I started over, I thought it would slow down eventually. It didn’t. It expanded.

I’ve had a complicated relationship with showing up online. Instagram was where I tried for years to share this evolution in real time, and it never quite fit. The platform kept changing. I kept changing faster. I’d find a voice, then outgrow it before anyone had the chance to find me. There were so many versions of me visible over those years, which is honest, but made it hard to build something that felt like home.

I started thinking seriously about Substack two days before I found out I was pregnant. I sat down and wrote out what it could be: writing about life in DC, becoming a new wife, the way this work I do now creates a different kind of presence in the world. The kind that isn’t just personal. The kind that ripples out into every room you walk into, every relationship you're in, every life you touch.

Then seven weeks of family visits, holiday logistics, and a move to plan, and I let it sit. Not because I forgot it. Because I’ve learned there’s a difference between the right idea and the right moment.

I’ve been in what I call the Invisible Era, a concept I write about in my book, Evolving You. Where you’ve done enough work that you stop white-knuckling everything, and you just live. Peacefully. Quietly. Not idle, and not performing either. It’s been a season of building habits that match the woman I want to be, laying the foundation for what comes next.

And now here I am, half-unpacked in a city that doesn’t know me yet, twenty-three weeks along, starting this anyway.

Because it’s time.

Here’s what I’ve learned from every version of starting over: if I wait until life is calm, I’ll never start. Because the in-between is not the obstacle. It is the work. It is the lived experience. It is the place worth writing from.

If you’ve read Evolving You, you already know the core of what I believe: you don’t have to manage your way to a better life. You release what was never meant to be carried, and you let things move. My life didn’t change because I pushed harder. It changed because I stopped holding what I wasn’t meant to hold.

That principle doesn’t disappear when life gets better. It gets quieter. More integrated. Right now, it looks like walking a 2.5-mile loop around a neighborhood that is slowly becoming mine. Finding a new gym. Sitting in a coffee shop alone, noticing what comes up. Building something new out of what the inner work made possible.

This space is where I think out loud. Where I write from inside the experience, not just after it. Some weeks that will look like personal essays: life in DC, becoming a mother, what it actually feels like to evolve in real time. Some weeks it will look like the deeper work: NLP, MER®, emotional release, the patterns that quietly shape everything. And sometimes it will widen out into the bigger questions about culture, perception, and what it means to stay grounded in a world that often isn’t.

It isn’t a polished highlight reel. It isn’t a content machine. It’s one post, on Wednesdays, written from inside the life I’m actually living.

If you’re here, you’re probably someone who has already done a lot of work on yourself. Who knows there’s another level, even if you can’t fully name it yet. Who is ready to stop managing and start thriving.

This is for you. And honestly, it’s for me too.

Our evolution doesn’t wait for the perfect moment. It happens while we’re living it.

That’s why I’m starting now.

If this resonates, I'd love for you to subscribe. It's free, it's once a week, and it shows up on Wednesdays. No noise. Just this.

With all my gratitude,
Alexus

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