“We’re preparing to move towards normal, not back to normal.”I read a great post the other day that introduced to me this phrasing, and I really love it. Tim and I have been talking a lot about the concept of “normalcy” and how we will reach again this threshold. Up to this point, our conversations felt rather bifurcated: there was life as we knew it before, and the question was how we would return to this in the future. The dichotomy filled me with a sort of dread because the question felt so unanswerable. Seriously, how would we ever get our old lives back?Now, I can confidently say… we won’t. We’re moving towards normal, but it won’t be back to normal. And that’s okay. As we’re looking into the weeks ahead, we are examining a new schedule to have our shop working more, but our team will continue to work in single-person shifts in our workshop for the foreseeable future. This means our workshop can get only so much work done, and our services will remain limited as a result. We will continue to be open by appointment only and we will likely remain on this schedule for the duration of the summer, if not longer. It won’t be easy, but we’re committed to seeing this through in the safest way possible for our employees and for our clients.  But we’re planning more fun events for our Secret Shop and we’ll introduce by-appointment private shopping days within the next few weeks so that you can shop our collection in person once again. We are quite excited to get back to private appointments again because, honestly, shopping for fine jewelry online just isn’t the same thing as seeing it in person – and we miss seeing you! Truly, what sets our shop apart is the personalized experience we provide to our clients and we will never move away from this model. In the meantime, always know that you can continue to reach us via email for custom orders, and you can shop much of our in-stock collection online anytime.My personal “new normal” is balancing the demands of keeping our small business afloat with the absence of available childcare that would normally enable me to do this. It also means a lot more time in our cabin in the woods than we originally anticipated, so my new normal entails a lot more bug repellant than I have needed in my entire life. But we’re doing well, and we will continue to adjust as things move forward. We’re looking forward to moving towards normal with you all, one day at a time.