Getting things done :)

We have a couple exciting things done for our trip!! Which makes it seem a lot more real :)

We purchased out tickets to Italy. No going back now!! Our official leave date is Oct 2nd. We fly out from Chicago at like 10:45 at night, which I am actually kind of happy about. I don't like to fly and it is a first flight for 2 of my children and the last time Alex flew he was like 6 so he barely remembers it. I think it will be good for them to be tired and able to sleep for the first part of this crazy long flight. We fly from here to Turkey and have a 5 hr layover in Turkey, then fly into Rome, Italy. Turkey is kind of on the brink of some civil unrest so some prayers for safety while there waiting for our flight out would be appreciated :) Buying  the tickets was very exciting, we got an awesome deal, but it still kind of felt a little like it could just be a vacation. Not like we were leaving for a WHOLE YEAR!!! Well this next thing we did changed that for sure!!

We have officially found a home for our first 3 months in Italy!! We are soo excited! We love it!!! We will be living in Perugia, Umbria, Italy! It is a bigger city (actually the capitol in Umbria) so we don't have to worry about needing a vehicle to get places. We can rely on the public transportation, Wifi won't be an issue so communicating with family and friends will be pretty easy also. Here is a link to view the neighborhood on google maps. I am super excited!! Paying for our rent and getting a place to stay for our first 3 months over there has made it so much more real! Now I just have to start getting rid of our stuff here and packing up the few things we want to keep. Pretty much everything is going so if someone needs something make an offer!! We also need boxes so if anyone has any we will take them off your hands for ya! :)

Tim just sent me an email saying that one of these is our mailbox while there!! Yay!!

Why?

We are planning on taking a year long trip, adventure as a family leaving at the end of this summer. I think the question I have gotten most is why? Why would we want to leave for a year? Why would we want to take our kids out of school? Why would we want to leave our family? Friends? Church? Comforts? Lots of why's? So hopefully this post will help you all to understand a little bit about why we want to do this. 

I guess the first thing so far is that we are feeling drawn to do this. For that reason for sure I do not know. But we have prayed and prayed about it and it feels like it is something that God wants us to do. 

Family bonding.  It will be a year without the distractions of school functions, friends houses and just the busyness of life. I know we are just removing ourselves from one location to another but we will be taking a lot more time to invest in our relationships with each other  Homeschooling the kids, taking time to explore new places and learn new languages and make new friends. We are not bringing our TV  just want to spend time with the kids and each other. 

Experiencing a new culture!! Personally I think we are blind to a lot of things living here. We complain that our houses are too small (me included). We ignore our neighbors, communities because we are too busy and it is not our problem (in the research I have done this is mainly a US thing, I read about when it is time to harvest Olives in Italy everybody stops what they are doing and they go help the farmers and they have fun doing it! They make little competitions out of it, eat meals together while doing it! Fun!!). I think it would be a great thing for us to see the way other people do it. What is important to them, what do they value, what are their traditions? 

Living out of a suitcase!! Scary, yet I am very excited to do this! I am excited to sell most of our belongings and live off the minimum amount of things we can for a year!! Hopefully it will help rid us of some of our greediness :) 

Sightseeing! I LOVE traveling and seeing new places!! I am very excited to see things that are OLD! We have building that are a hundred or a few hundred years old and think it is amazing!! We will see things made a thousand years ago!! I love photography and am super excited to get to photograph so many cool locations!! I want my kids to know that there is more to life than what is just outside there front door. They don't have to spend their whole existence in the same place, they can go anywhere! Someone has told me that once you start traveling you can never get enough of it. And I can say that from the few places we have been I am hooked! I want to see everything! There is so much beauty, so many things God has put here for us to experience and see. 

Am I scared? YUP! Overwhelmed? YUP! Excited? YUP! There is so much to plan and figure out. Banking, Health insurance (How do you go to the DR. in another country?), passports, Visa's  plane tickets, international drivers licenses  budgeting, saving, grocery shopping, schooling.  Things are different and I am comfortable and an introvert.  Where will we live? How will we find a place to live? What do we pack? I plan on updating this as we get things planned and through out our trip. Did you know there are almost no books on how to do something like this? Makes planning hard :(