zen motherhood

 I love road trips. I never really went on any when I was a kid, but I love them. I love the planning. Planning the snacks. Planning the best route.  When the kids were young, planning out games or movies for the ride. So when we decided that once the house was sold that we would go on the mother of all road trips, I was excited. I had it all figured out- our first few weeks of moving out of the house we would spend locally. Starting off with a treat to a luxury local hotel and then transitioning to something more practical to say our good bye's and wrap up loose ends.  We would then venture to South Carolina to see my parents but ensure to  practice safe covid protocol and social distancing. Then on to Melbourne, Florida to see the rest of family and prepare for the last leg of the trip. Our final stop would be in Miami to board the plane to - Barbados. It felt like a very solid plan and living on the road with a dog and only one child in tow sounded like an episode...

This is more of a side story to my last post. I like tangents but this one was too long to include. I alluded a few times to a suitcase I couldn't part with which was labeled Office. I was pretty excited about this little gem, but it became the subject of every joke along our journey. It was comprised of all the basic office items that I thought we would need while 'en route': envelopes and stamps, pens, batteries, chargers, paper, a mini scanner, a mobile printer, and of course a small whiteboard.  As you can guess it was a little heavy and I was questioned on multiple occasions if this suitcase was really necessary. We could just as easily locate an office supply store or use the hotel business center right? Part of my reasons were to avoid this scramble to find a place to print out something or copy an important doc while we spent time on the road and due to covid many business centers were not even open anymore.   As we hauled everything into the trailer the first nig...

Getting ready for Barbados, probably the easiest thing about it, I thought, was going to be packing. A moving company would be coming in to do the boxing up of all of our things.  So I figured my job would be throwing some stuff in suitcases, labeling some stuff for packing. Bam. Done. So I quickly organized our belongings into 4 main categories of items (because we can't just throw stuff around willy nilly now can we?):  1) Donate- I had to put a big orange sign on these things that said DONATE but it felt good to shed some old stuff. 2) Denver - at the end of our Barbados expedition our plan is still to wind up in Denver, so I put a big green sign on these items that would be put in long term storage in Denver labeled of course - DENVER. 3) Barbados Ship- not everything can fit in suitcases so I even designated a room that I labeled with one big blue sign BARBADOS!!! 4) Barbados Pack- we would schlep this stuff on our flight/road trip so no labels for this stuff. I just star...

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...

I am officially a serial cleaner. I can't stop. It seems fueled by the lovely skill that I see everything that is not in its right place. Everything. Exhibit A: There is a can of V8 juice sitting on the coffee table that has been there for over a day. I have been waiting to see if anyone will pick it up. They have not. Why I don't pick it up myself is beyond me. I feel this need to force myself to let things go. That the can is not hurting anyone. Surely it's empty so it's just a can. ~~But what if it's not. What if it's full and it's getting all moldy?! Ack. Yes Cathy fans, I just ack'd. I have even resorted to evaluating my need to clean. Because it seems to be a problem. Yes I am my own therapist. It's cheaper that way. I sometimes wonder if I didn't notice everything would I still feel the need to clean. I also wonder why I  have this maddening compulsion To clean. I mean a little dust never hurt anyone right?? It is partly geneti...