zen motherhood

I failed to mention in my last blog post that selling the house was a spawned task from my original list- Task 2: Find a Place to Live. We felt we couldn't look at a new place until we started to sell the current place. In hind sight not sure why those things couldn't have run in parallel but I am sequence kind of gal so here we are. So with selling the house, we could fully initiate Find a Place to Live. This would seem pretty straight forward right? Search up on AirBnB and done. We started to find however, our requirements for a home were narrowing our options, one being we had a fluid house of 5 people so 4 bedrooms would need to be our minimum. Apparently there are not a lot of 4 bedroom homes on the island that are not a billion dollars. We also would like a number of bathrooms to accommodate this said 5 people so a minimum of 4 bathrooms. (we have three girls in that mix so cast all the judgement you want on us sharing bathrooms- you will understand if you have girls) And...

One task that was not on my original Project Barbados: Sell the House.  It was on our Project Denver list, of course, but that was slated for spring of 2021. It seems we have an accelerated timeline and a little bit of scope creep.  Spring is usually the best time to sell a house in the US. The weather is nice, people are looking for new options with the school year nearing its end and in some cases, companies are handing out their bonuses.  However, in the aftermath of COVID lockdowns, the real estate market was a bit different. Houses were flying off the shelf in the summer, so we opted to take a chance and get ourselves out there. I had several reasons to doubt that we would sell fast. Despite the stories we had heard, I still couldn't shake that, technically, we chose the slowest time of the year to put it on the market. We had a gigantic house (over 7000 sq ft/ 650 sq m) and we sat on a large piece of conservancy land (50 acres). We had a gigantic koi pond and a pool...

Five tasks.  To move to another country/location, I thought, 5, simple, tasks. 1) Figure out schools for kids. 2) Figure out a place to live. 3) Figure out work.  4) Pack stuff.  5) Get on plane. Simple right? Um seems not. I now have a list of 150 tasks.  Two still In Progress and 2 in To Do.   Through those 150 there have been so many good stories that I couldn't help but dust off the old blog and share some of the more humorous ones that have stretched my zen practice to it's thinnest point. This is edition 1 of series 1. Yeah that's right, I am planning more than one of these things.  To catch everyone up- we moved to Barbados. We were living in Virginia, in the process of planning to move to Denver, Colorado, when my husband got an expat opportunity so we decided to take it. This is where the story begins. For us, we like to do things big and in multiples- when we got married we figured that wasn't enough, so we decided to move to the US, buy a ho...