In mid-2012, I found myself at loose ends.

A few years earlier, we’d moved from NYC to Cyprus, and in 2011, we’d packed up once again and relocated to Copenhagen. Suddenly, the kids were old enough to be in school full time and there was some breathing room.

As well as a lot of free time to fill.

Wine and Cheese (Doodles) was originally a way to start writing again, something I had always done, but which had taken a backseat to marriage, motherhood, and moving across oceans.

Those writing muscles, which had been dormant for a decade, came roaring back to life.

At the beginning, the blog was a catch-all for musings, rants, and everything in between. I posted photos of my attempts at knitting and photography. I mused about life outside my own country and why there was always a Dane up my backside. It didn’t take long, however, to figure out that I kept coming back to the same subjects: motherhood, expat life, relationships, and womanhood. Eventually, I found myself parked at the intersection of all of the above and the blog started to take shape.

Though it started as a personal hobby, Wine and Cheese (Doodles) has been viewed almost half a million times. At its height, viral posts like Nine Expats You’ll Meet Abroad and Four Expats and a Funeral were viewed and shared tens of thousands of times.

In 2018, I compiled an array of blog pieces about expatriate life and bound them together in the book There’s Some Place Like Home: Lessons From a Decade Abroad.

As my writing focus shifted to other projects, the twice a week posts slowed to weekly, then eventually monthly. And though I updated the blog during the Covid-19 lockdown of 2020-21 – and even dabbled in a micro-podcast/blog hybrid – the blog was slowly and peacefully coming to a natural close.

In the truest sense of the phrase, Wine and Cheese (Doodles) served its purpose – it got me writing again.

In 2023, I published my memoir, It’s a Lot to Unpack, about the difficulty of retaining my own identity while the world viewed me as nothing more than an expat partner.

It seems like a good place to unpack for good.

Though inactive, Wine and Cheese (Doodles) will remain in place as an archive for more than 500 essays spanning ten years.