As kind of a follow up to my last post, as I look around my house getting ready to move, I have to wonder, where did all this shit come from? Seriously, in almost 9 years of living here, I don't know how we accumulated all this stuff! Now I need to figure out what goes, what gets donated, what goes to friends, what gets trashed, what goes to storage, etc etc... It's the most overwhelming process no matter how I look at it. And everytime I do start to look at it, I think...well, the kids will be back to school in "x" weeks. Procrastinating much? I do work best under pressure but I imagine the fall is not going to be a pretty sight! Going back to my last post, I guess it's giving me an opportunity to recycle and reduce the things we want and only buy what we need and I'm certainly not buying much these days knowing I'm just going to have to move it soon anyways.
We did get some potential good news last week too - we accidentally found a renter for our cape house. We have a verbal agreement from her and that's all I'm going to say before I jinx it. I'm hoping to have it all tied up within a week or two. But that means getting all the crap out of the cape house now too. The good thing is that we believe she's going to keep all the furniture and stuff so it will be more about getting out our personal crap. At least with us moving forward on construction this week I've been making several trips down over the last week and bringing stuff back with me. But now it sits in the garage and in my office waiting to be "relocated" to their new homes - where, I'm not quite sure...but at least I'm slowly clearing out one house (only to add content to the other!).
On another note, we got our travel plans late last week. We are doing our "discovery" trip the first week of November where Josh and I will go to Barcelona for a few days on a house/apartment hunting trip. I've very excited about this part, not only to look for a place but also to become more familiar with the area so that when we get there with the kids we won't be going in completely blind. I was really nervous about not getting a discovery trip and showing up with the kids and dogs and not knowing where in the world to go. So this was a major relief on my end to know that I'll hopefully be able to tell the kids when we get there, "this is where we will play in the park and this is where you'll go to school and this is where we are going to live". Let's keep our fingers crossed that we find a place while we are there.
If we don't find a place while we are on our Discovery trip, Josh will need to find one on his own. He will be leaving us around Dec 1 to start the process of transitioning to the BCN office. He will come home for the holidays around Dec 22 to which I am enternally grateful. Besides being worried about going into a new country and city blind, I was also concerned about how we were going to handle the holidays with the kids in a new country. Thankfully, I now don't need to worry about it since we'll be here. I'm sure it will be on a smaller scale since we'll be leaving a few days later but at least we'll be able to take part in the traditions from previous years like making Christmas cookies with Aidan & Liam's friends, making reindeer food, Chinese food on xmas eve with friends and the luminaries. And of course, celebrating with our families!! I'm so glad we don't have to miss that! We will leave for BCN as a family shortly after the New Year.
In the meantime I'm slowly making progress on other items. School applications have been submitted, wires in the process of transferring and passports being renewed. We're close to being done with the most time sensitive items, at least as far as I can tell. My notebook now has 3 pages of "to do" items, so while they aren't all as time sensitive as those, I'm far from done and really just getting started!
Finally we're planning to tell the kids about the move this week. Once again I've been testing the waters with Aidan. Josh and I went to VT over the weekend and I showed Aidan where that was on the map. He said it wasn't far. So I pointed to Spain and asked him if he thought that was far. He said, "well, I think we can walk there". I told him we'd have to take a plane. He reconsidered his answer then. Tonight we were reading a book, UP, and part of the book essentially stated that possessions aren't important, it's people who are important. So once again I said, "even if we don't live here or have a lot of toys, we'll still be a family and be together." Both he and Josh looked at me like I was a little on the crazed side. Not me!!!!
Will post as soon as we tell Aidan so you can hear the agonizing details of telling our 5 year old that we are not just moving but moving to a country where none of us speak the language. Wish us luck!
Julie
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