Our family has decided to take a family gap year. What exactly is that you might ask. Basically, my husband and I and our 3 kids (ages; 8, 6, and 1) are going to travel around the globe for the next year in hopes of spending more quality time together, slowing down and minimizing our lifestyle, but mainly to explore other countries and cultures to possibly find a better fit for us. We have lived together in NYC for almost 11 years. We got married here and had all our kids here, but the city no longer feels like home, so lets go out and find a new home! For all we know at the end of this journey we will realize New York is our best bet, but for now we are open and excited for new possibilities.
E and I discussed living abroad since the day we first met. But time was passing by quickly and we still hadn’t followed our dream. Last summer, after I broke my ankle pretty badly, it really pushed us in the direction of our aspiration. I think it made us realize nothing is safe or secure. Shit happens. Let’s LIVE! We started talking about our dream to live in Italy and quickly that morphed into the idea of traveling the world instead of settling in one country, or one city. We spent many nights walking (me scooting on my knee scooter) and talking about the pros and cons, the logistics, etc. etc.
E decided he would work remotely part time and explore new projects, so that opened up our schedule fully. He can work from anywhere where there is WiFi. Our dog Lucy (our first baby) will spend the year with my mom in Philadelphia: Grandma Camp. Our older kids are a year ahead in school thanks to their fall birthdays and NYC public school cut off dates. That means we don’t need to home school! We will spend the year really focusing on learning about geography, and different cultures, but also allow the kids a lot of time to explore and just be kids. They both love to read, so we are bringing along kindles and plan to borrow books from the NYCPL. We did set a goal for all of us to focus on our writing: We bought fancy journals for the whole family, and we all (except The Baby) need to write in them daily.
In addition to our personal journals, E and I plan on updating this blog weekly. We want to keep all our friends and family in the loop and also share our adventure with anyone following. At this point I have no idea how it will all play out, and I’m finding blogging a bit challenging. I hope if I take the pressure off myself to be perfect and just post for fun it will become more fun 🙂