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M just came up to us and said a neighbor boy,

“Stepped on my face and hurt it. And he also hurt my soul and broke my heart.”

Turns out travel blogging is much different when traveling with kids- groundbreaking, right?  If you have tracked any of my old posts from my last forays through Europe, pre-kids, you’ll know that we were pretty vigilant about stopping and updating the blog so that our friends at home could follow along.

This time, stopping at a local Internet cafe to compose a post was not an option with the kids in tow.  Also, there are no longer Internet cafes on every corner in Europe! Smart phones have seemingly claimed another victim.  It didn’t matter though because whenever we had down time I was pretty exhausted from the daily adventures.

Fear not though, dear reader! I’m back home now and these grown-up hacks managed to survive, and thrive, traveling in Europe with small kids for almost two months.  If we can do it, you can!

The first step to preparing to go on our epic trip was to actually decide when we would return. We already had round-trip tickets booked to/from Ireland to attend Jon’s best friend’s wedding.  It was a destination wedding and he and his fiancé had booked a group flight for their 30 guests from Dulles.  We had to get the return date changed before we could decide upon our route or loose itinerary.

Ideally we wanted to change the departure city to somewhere more central than Dublin!  We considered Nice, France which would have allowed us to end with some time on the French Riviera.  We also looked into Paris, Vienna, and Frankfurt as possible departure cities because they would allow us to spend the most time traveling in mainland Europe.  In the end though, Aer Lingus allowed us to change the date of departure, but not the location of departure, so we knew we had to somehow find our way back to Dublin by the end date.

The only other known at the onset of our planning was that we wanted to visit our friend Christine in Switzerland.  I contacted her about our plans and she was enthusiastic that we come.  She had a couple of days off in August, and requested a couple more on top of what was already scheduled so we could have a nice stretch of time together.

Now we could get serious about making our two month adventure with kids a reality!

 

So, this epic endeavor to travel with our kids for six weeks was precipitated by the wedding of Jon’s best friend Jon D.  He proposed to his almost-wife Jeanna about a year ago and clued us into their plans to get married in Ireland.  A few months later the tickets were booked and accommodations paid, and then my Jon quit his job.  Instead of stressing about the next step we decided to extend the trip to travel because we can always make more money, but we can never make more time.  I still don’t know what the plan will be when we get back, but for now we are going where adventure leads us.

The first place adventure led us was to Dulles airport.  My Jon’s cousin drove us to the airport on a sunny early afternoon and dropped us off at the gate, just as any rockstar cousin would.  We found the rest of the 25 or so members of the wedding party and proceeded through the excruciatingly long line at the International Security area with our antsy small children.

We arrived at the gate only to find out our flight was late due to weather.  A storm had stirred up over DC and many flights were grounded flying in.  We were delayed. And then delayed again. And again.  Then at 10PM when our kids were nearly bonkers, they announced that they had to cancel the flight due to crew “time-out”.

I was super wanting to “time-out” of my life at that point because I was hot, tired, and grumpy and couldn’t help but be short tempered with my hot, tired, and grumpy little humans.  But, I told them, and myself, that however frustrated we were feeling was nothing compared to how the bride and groom were feeling after painstakingly planning this whole wedding week.

Basically the only way to get all of the wedding party to the actually wedding in Ireland with any semblance of time left to attend the wedding was for us to split the party up and stomach a middle of the night layover, instead of the direct originally scheduled.  Jon and I ended up in the BWI group, which we wanted to be in anyway because we knew it would be less busy, heading up the group of humans who had never traveled internationally before.  This should be interesting, but so far so good. We have a layover in London and then off to Dublin to try to catch up with our planned itinerary.  Wish us luck!

 

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Well, here we are, more than ten years after my last post.  So many things have changed in that time frame, both personally for me, politically for the U.S., and globally as well.

Let’s get you up to speed on me though.  You last saw me when my husband and I were frolicking through Europe on what we had dubbed our “Mega-moon”.  This epic two month trip fell almost a year after our actual wedding.  We had decided that we would wait the year so J could finished his schooling, but before he had to begin his professional life, to have this unencumbered trip abroad.

Of course, as many of you know, pre-kids nothing anyone ever tells you can prepare you for how much you will miss those days of freedom.  Days when you can meet a friend for lunch at the last minute, see an afternoon movie and then catch the next one just because you can, or stay out late at a friends and decide to sleep there because you’re too tired to drive home.  It’s funny how our idea of freedom evolves at different stages in our lives.  Now my idea of freedom involves a solo trip to Target with a coffee in hand and a $100 gift card burning a hole in my wallet.

I think my silence on this blog over the past several years is the best barometer of that change.  In the ten years since, J and I have earned several higher education degrees between the two of us, had two awesome kids, moved three times between two different states, bought our first house, said goodbye to the dogs that we raised from puppies, and grown our love for each other in a million different ways.

But, that said, adulting is hard.  Way harder than I ever imagined it would be as a petulant young adult.  Having a job and kids and a mortgage and student loans and utility bills and groceries and meals to plan, and faces to feed, and nurture, and love, and teach, is utterly exhausting. Yes, yes.  Rewarding and amazing and all that stuff.  I love my little people more than anything in the world.  You know all that though.  What I hope you see from this blog though is that the ugly and hard and beautiful and self-conscious and angry and loved and tender can all coexist at once.  That it’s okay to just be.

Let’s be clear from the beginning of this new era– I had my first child just as I was finishing my Masters degree from a major university and I chose to stay home because the amount of money I would make straight out of graduate school would be so greatly reduced by quality childcare that it didn’t seem to work for our family.  We  were fortunate enough that we could scrape by with me staying home even if largely on my husband’s minimum wage job (medical residency).  I have loved my time home, but I’m not going to sugar coat it by saying it’s been a dream come true.  I never sat home as a child and imagined myself as anything other than a working woman; a feminist who would take no prisoners at whatever profession I decided upon.  That’s the thing though- the dream of myself as a working professional adult never fleshed itself out.  I never held one profession in such esteem that it became a goal of which I wanted to achieve.  I saw my mom work her ass off and “love her job”, but miss out on doing much of anything with us.  She was always either working or napping it seemed.  I wanted more time with her because she was so kind to us, but I understood that her life’s fulfillment came from arenas not exclusive of us.  That said, I think it ingrained in me a priority not of living to work, but of working to live the life I wanted, and really nothing more.

That’s where we find ourselves today.  Academic life was different.  It never seemed like work.  I wanted to read and immerse myself in the research and love of learning.  It was exciting and fulfilling to me to be in that environment.  If college/graduate school/medical school could go on forever and we could just get paid to read and learn and research we would both probably jump at the chance.  This monetization of intellect though has really been weighing us down.  J especially has been getting burned out at the constant emergent nature of even his non-clinical job.  Everyone wants everything in a hurry and everyone wants the answer they seek even if it’s not correct or in a patient’s best interest.  He never has been able to separate his job from the patient at the receiving end, and I love him for being the kind of person who can’t, even in a sea of others who want the easiest way out, or to feed their egos with the most complicated answer instead.  He reached a breaking point, and coupled with a new job that he discovered was perhaps handling procedures in a questionable manner, he quit and walked out.

We had discussed his desire to do so, and I knew he needed kind of a moment to reset anyway, so we assessed our finances and decided we could absorb the blow for a little bit.  I had been planning to go to work a few months from now anyway when our youngest started Kindergarten.  Now this just opened for me up to start looking a little earlier and start polishing the cobwebs off of my resume.

We started looking for new jobs in J’s field immediately, but then a random comment from a friend changed our plans completely and this blog has been reborn.

Months ago, our family had already paid for a trip to Ireland in July for J’s best friend Jon’s wedding.  Suddenly we realized that we are now presented with the opportunity to once again have an epic European adventure, but this time with our kids in tow!

I am keeping the old posts I wrote back in 2008, sans kids, to juxtapose against our new explorations as a family of four.  If any of you were original readers I’m sure many of you can relate to this new stage in life.  We will be endeavoring to do this with just about as much money as we had as a couple, but with all four of us.  My hope is that by my own imperfect attempts we can somehow help you feel confident in taking on your own ill-advised but much desired trip, knowing that the imperfections in life are really the ones that stand out most of all in the end.

Today I’m thinking about working out even more than I usually (think about) do(ing) it.  Winter on the East Coast made me lethargic and introverted. I just wanted to curl up on the couch and eat.  I think Spring is called Spring because it surprises you with its arrival. Just when you become complacent in the security of your layers, you are forced upon the world in a parade of sun dresses and swim suits.  

I managed to turn the heat off for a week. But then my roommate confessed to me that his toe froze one night and turned blue and he had to use one of his pots to soak it in warm water.  That almost made me projectile vomit all over his face, so I decided that I can’t expedite Spring by cutting off Winter. 

Yesterday I went to the ear doctor. I haven’t gone since I was about 12 but I’ve had this weird ear congestion feeling for several months so thought I should get it checked out.  They used this little suction tube… Like the one used at the dentist, (Jon insists it’s called “Mr. Thirsty” but I think that is just specific to his childhood dentist’s office…), but smaller to vacuum my ear. It was soooo cathartic! Spring cleaning at its best.  Except that when he pulled out about 5lbs of wax I just had to sheepishly acknowledge it by some offhanded semi-humorous (in my opinion at least) comment.  Things like that make you feel embarrassingly dirty… even though everyone has it, and those doctors probably see that a hundred times a day. I mean, if they sold at home ear vacuums I would definitely buy one! But how else are you supposed to get it clean if you aren’t even supposed to stick a que tip in your ear? 

Anyway, my public service announcement of the day is for everyone to make an appointment to have their ears sucked out.  It is amazing! I felt like I could hear a pin drop in a concert. 

My party planning is reaching a fever pitch. I have a wedding next week… But I feel like that’s all in the bag. (We’ll see what I’m saying about this time next week though…). I’m already starting the planning process for a party we are having here in July. I have a problem. My (self) likes to party all the time, paaarty aaaall the time!

I had an amazing time in Tennessee last week.  My Irish friends came in for the wedding too and we bunked up in a cabin together in the Smokey Mountains. It was a drinking fest for sure. I’m letting my liver rest now. “I’m all aquiver, my love my liver.”

I live under a constant cloud.  Fear grips my heart as I am held hostage by my life.  I can’t see a way out, and so I try to block it out of my consciousness until the day when I can ignore it no more.  It lives and breathes, waiting…

I’m drowning.  It’s a slow death, but one that binds our bodies and stifles our spirit.  

It’s Jon’s student loan debt.  I managed to squeak out of my undergraduate years with zero debt, thanks almost entirely to being the progeny of an economics professor who took steps to fund my education through available state programs when I was about 9.  Jon, unfortunately, was not so lucky.  Many, many years later… and having now completed both an undergraduate degree and an insanely expensive medical degree, we are faced with the very real possibility that his loans will not be paid off in our working lifetime.  They are as much as a well appointed house.  A house that we might never be able to afford because of these loans hanging over our heads.  

So, I implore you! Please go to this site and vote for this proposal for the government to include student loan debt forgiveness in their economic stimulus plan!

Here’s another interesting article on the topic.

It’s snowing outside and no one else is awake yet.  My dog and I are sharing a moment as we watch the big fluffy flakes fall outside our window. My other dog is completely buried under a blanket at my side.  He doesn’t care about snow. He prefers his sleep.

Tomorrow is the Inauguration and I feel horribly unprepared.  It seems like an impossible thing to prepare for.  Friends have already begun to arrive from Portland… They booked their flights months ago but were still unable to find any flights into Baltimore or D.C.  Instead, my friend Ryan, who is here now, flew into Philly and took the Chinatown bus down yesterday.  My friends Jonah and Dana flew into NYC and spent the weekend with friends and will be attempting to take the Chinatown bus down from there today.  I spoke with Jonah yesterday and he said they are basically expecting to be stuck in traffic for about 10 hours.  I must buy gloves.  And a hat. Although hats usually make me look like I’m wearing a condom on my head. It’s the curls. 

What will tomorrow bring?  I am filled with wariness over the endeavor I am about to undertake.  All I can think about is getting down to D.C. and the possibility that something (Traffic? Mobs?) might keep me from reaching it.  I haven’t even allowed myself to get excited about being there, until I know that it is true.  Somehow we must make it!  

I am saving nothing for the way back.

I received an e-mail today saying that my Photobucket account had been inactive and that I needed to log in to insure that they didn’t shut it down.  Once there I realized that there were a couple of photos on there that I uploaded in Europe, that due to time constraints or connectivity issues, I was never able to post.  In honor of my former springtime, backpacking self, I’ll proceed to do so now. 

Mainly, it was this one which was taken at The Basilique du Sacre Coeur in Paris.

The weird part is, and I know it’s hard to see but…. I swear the Jesus is the spitting image of Chong.