We have been packing all day Saturday. Bonnie has been packing all day Saturday. A great aspect of this trip I am really looking forward to is that my kids’ elementary school requires all students to wear uniforms. This should cut down on the clothes they will wear, but we are still packing 21 sets of the following for each child: underwear, pants, short sleeve shirts, long sleeve shirts, 7 shorts, two sweat shirts, a jacket, a raincoat, a swimming towel, a set of rain boots, tennis shoes, sandals, water shoes, swimsuit, and two formal outfits for church.

Getting each child to cooperate in choosing these items is insane. My poor wife has been corralling them all day, and I have been yelling at them all day. Other items we are packing is our instapot, rice cooker, large pot, steamer, electric tea kettle, mobile printer, mobile scanner, laptop (for my office). My wife did NOT want me to take this photo of her.

She has been packing all day long. Luckily for us, her sister came over around 7pm (I doubt we will get to bed before 1am. Her and her sister are masters of Tetris. The trick however is to make sure each bag does not weigh more than 55 lbs. The first bag we packed weighed 78. I don’t know how we are going to do this. The below bag is holding our precious instapot. I swear the first time I used it to make artichokes, that it conjures actual magic.

we were able to pack the kids Saturday. Hopefully we pack ourselves today.

Three days to go.

For those of you that don’t know, my father in law, comes to our home every single Friday in order to watch our children so we can have a date night. We had four children within five and a half years so a date night once a week is needed, and appreciated. I think having this date night once a week has really helped our marriage, for the most part we are two ships passing in the night.

When we decided to start having children, we decided together that a parent should be with the children at all times until they start preschool. We really didn’t want to rely too much on babysitters, and were against daycare. Before our youngest started preschool, our schedules would be reflective, if I was with the baby, she would be at work, and vice versa. I would typically work Monday morning, all day Tuesday, Wednesday evening, Thursday evening and Friday morning. So that means Bonnie would work Monday afternoon, Tuesday afternoon (thanks to my wonderful mother in law who would watch a baby of ours), all day Wednesday and Thursday, and Friday afternoon. We would see each other in the evening, sometimes we would work together for bed time routine. Some evenings we would say a few sentences before we passed out.

Needless to say a date night was our saving grace. Last night for our final date night until we get back, we went to the Hot Tubs of Berkeley. It is a rent by the hour hot tub establishment where we rent a private room that has a sauna, shower, hot tub and mattress. It is exactly where your first thought went.. We go there so often for our date nights, that the manager knows us on a first name basis. We keep inviting him to all the kids birthday parties because he has a toddler of his own. We just want people to ask him how he knows us.

Moving on, then we went to an Ethiopian restaurant. Bonnie’s favorite food is Ethiopian food. I tolerate it because she loves it. If you haven’t had Ethiopian food, imagine that someone serves you a pizza platter full of piles of meat and vegetable dishes. The platter’s surface is covered by a sour tasting pancake type bread called injera. They also serve you extra injera bread to use to scoop up the food and eat it. It’s ok, but she loves it.

Then we ended our date night at my office in order to print out some forms we need for our trip. This isn’t an exciting post, except for the fact to highlight that for the past eight or nine years, my father in law has given us a date night every week. Part of me realizes he isn’t doing it for us, but to see his grandchildren. This trip is going to be life altering, but there is a flip side to that. We are also taking the grandchildren away from the grandparents who see them on a weekly basis. This trips’ collateral damage is that the grandparents won’t be able to see the grandbabies. I hope and pray this six months abroad doesn’t irrevocably affect the relationships we have with the grandparents, but time will tell.

Four days to go.

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Tonight we took our three older kids to see Hamilton. For the last couple years our kids have enjoyed the soundtrack to the musical. I think I was watching our kids faces more than the actual play. Most of the time they were rapt with attention. During the songs they knew their mouths would hang open. Towards the end it was proving difficult for our youngest of the kids we took, our third child. Last night my wonderful sister in law helped fold 5 loads of the kids laundry. We have a few more loads to wash before we start concentrating on packing our luggage.

It’s still hard to believe a week from now we will he descending in an airplane on our way to our new home. It still seems so surreal. So far I got a haircut, and our house isn’t a total mess. Not a whole lot to blog about today, but at least my nerves are at an all time high. I have dozens of items I need to deal with before we fly out, and a final date night to look forward to this Friday.

Now I am getting questions like “are you ready?” and the only real answer is “no”. I don’t think our family can be ready for such a huge change this will be. Frankly, I don’t think we’ll be ready for this trip until we are on the flight home in six months.

Winding Down and Winding Up.

My wife is taking a sabbatical. Her employer allows full time workers to request a sabbatical every seven years. The sabbatical is up to six months unpaid, and her job will be safe when she returns. Her work has been extraordinarily stressful, especially in recent years. She works extremely hard for her clients, and I can always tell that she’s had a rough day, not because she comes home worn, but you can see she probably had been crying that day. Some days she has to hospitalize one of her clients/patients, and she is always apologetic, and feels terrible, but it never bothers me. We are truly blessed. Every night we ask our children what they are grateful for, and when I am asked, I always say the same thing, “I’m grateful for healthy children.” So it could always be worse, after that, there isn’t much to really complain about. But I’m going to do it anyways.

My wife is a therapist and she has to wind down her clients and transfer them to other therapists before the end of this week (she has three more days). I on the other hand will need to be taking on more clients, and praying they are flexible when I tell them that I’m going to be living out of country for 6 months, flying in only for court appearances. I am stressful for many reasons, that are the exact opposite of my wife’s. I need to keep my business going. We decided that I can only fly in on a Monday and fly back on a Friday. She doesn’t want me away from her for too long, and I don’t understand why she wants me around in the first place. I plan on flying back once per month. We plan on taking a big trip in the country we are staying in once a month also. But before we get on the plane we are going to do the following:

1. Pack for at least three weeks
2. Ship appliances the home doesn’t have
3. take our older three kids to see Hamilton
4. I have four court appearances
5. Get both cars cleaned out and fixed
6. Park my truck at a friends place not too far from the airport
7. Clean our house
8. Go through our mail
9. I need a haircut
10. Get travelers insurance
11. Have one last date night
12. Clean up my office

No clue how this is going to happen. Pray for patience for my wife with me.

T-MINUS NINE DAYS BEFORE WE LEAVE

Over this past weekend we had a going away party. We invited our family and friends to celebrate our big move. In many ways it felt as though my wife was pregnant again, because we got all the same questions. And this is the reason for this blog, to vent about the agony of the party we just threw. My wife is a clinical psychologist, and when my children come of age, and seek my wisdom in choosing a spouse, I will advise them against marrying a therapist, the only worse profession to marry are lawyers.

My wife wholeheartedly believes I am on the spectrum, with strong Asperger tendencies. 1. I am obsessive about certain aspects of my life in phases. I was obsessed with soccer, I can still recall most world cup statistics from 1930-2006. Then I became obsessed with juggling a soccer ball and breaking the world record in that, then I became obsessed with Star Wars (still am to this day), I have read nearly every single book written on it to date. Getting into UC Berkeley, racquetball, law school, bar preparation, treasure hunting. All of these things I have obsessed about, and I demanded from myself perfection, or if not perfection, to know as much as I possibly could about it. I hate being interested in something, and knowing there are others who know more than I do. It sickens me to think I need to go to another human for information. 2. My wife thinks I have poor social skills.

I never spoke that much growing up, mainly because I just kept to myself as much as I could. I had a speech impediment when I was in elementary school, and was in speech therapy for over 5 years. (I couldn’t say my “R’s”) I clearly remember trying to talk to my friends, and them not understanding me. My mom saw this happen to me first hand, and I was in speech therapy the next week. Most people think I was quiet because I have three older sisters, and the stereotype always falls to the cliche “how could you get a word in edgewise”. The truth is, I just preferred to stay quiet. Especially in large groups.

I detest the social contracts we have with society. I hate the phrase “happy birthday” or “Merry Christmas” and I hate even more our obligation to say “thank you”. To this day I don’t understand why we need to thank someone for saying a sentence fragment to you on the anniversary of your being born or our savior being born. The party we had this past weekend was great, but I got the same questions over and over and over. “When do you leave?” “Why did you choose to live in this city?” “What made you decide to do this?” All kind of valid questions, but my memory is impeccable. I know exactly what I say to people, and can almost recall the date I say things to them. I remember full conversations I’ve had with people from 20 years ago, (another attribute of someone on the spectrum).

And the people that asked these questions, have asked them previously. I so wished I could have responded with “oh I already told you when you asked me 3 weeks ago when I was picking up my 1st grader, we were on this street, and your child was wearing a red jacket.” I know enough about social norms to not say this to them, and just grin and say the same thing again. It’s like we are pregnant again and everyone asks “when is she due”, of course no one remembers, but for me, it was excruciating answering the same question over and over again, not because it was the same question so much as it had been answered multiple times to the same person asking it. The next attribute that makes my wife convinced I might have Aspergers is I hate loud noises, but that’s on me, we decided to have four children, and I made my own bed with that one.

I remember during one of my birthday sleep overs when I was ten years old, I scolded my friends for being loud in the middle of the day. My mom took me aside and had to explain to me that it’s ok for them to be loud, it’s 230 in the afternoon, and to relax. The party this weekend wasn’t too loud, but I figure if I’m introducing the argument my wife has that I’m on the spectrum, might as well complete the argument as best I can. The bottom line is, I can’t wait to leave, not because it will be relaxing, as I will be working every day remotely, and dealing with my business daily. I can’t wait to leave so I can avoid the question “so…when do you guys leave again?”

For the sake of security I will not be sharing the name of the city we will be in. I will be sharing photos, but I don’t want to be specific with the details until we are back in the states. I do not want someone from where we are, finding this blog, and getting information on us. I know that seems paranoid, but if you lived in another country, you would consider us very wealthy, when we really aren’t. I don’t plan on being a target where we are going, and some anonymity in my posts only protect my children. As soon as the plane touches down back in the United States, I’ll update the blog, and give very detailed lists of cities, and addresses, etc… Until then, our six months abroad begins January 15.

Twenty three years ago in November of 1996 I started dating what was to be my wife. We were children, both 17, myself a senior in high school, my girlfriend, Bonnie, a junior.
By this time in my life I had been an uncle since I was 12, and by the time my three older sisters were done, I’d have altogether ten nieces and nephews. I love babies and always wanted to be a dad. You learn what you see and are surrounded by and I was surrounded by very fertile family members. (Fertility we will get to later). I’m the youngest of four children and the only boy.

Bonnie on the other hand is the oldest of three, she has a younger brother and sister. She DID NOT want children when we started dating. I don’t remember the exact conversation with her but I made it abundantly clear that whoever I marry will want to have children. I challenged Bonnie one time where I said something to the effect of how she would feel when we are in our sixties and all alone without children or maybe even grandchildren. For some reason that was the conversation that started her heart to soften towards having children. Before kids, Bonnie gave me some very strict conditions I would need to meet before she got pregnant. That story is for another blog entry. Needless to say I met these conditions and now we have four children. To date they are 9,8,6, and 4 years old. For the sake of privacy I will not be using their names.

My wife is a clinical psychologist working with a population that predominantly speaks Spanish. She is school taught Spanish (she studied abroad in Spain during college) and claims to not be fluent, but she gives therapy to people in their native language so I think she is fluent. Teaching our future children Spanish was one of her conditions to having kids and I gladly agreed to her only speaking Spanish to our children as soon as they were born, she offered to teach me Spanish after I passed the bar exam, knowing full well I was not going to pass it. After I passed the bar (on my first attempt) I told her she could speak to me in Spanish only.

After day three of her speaking Spanish to me I told her she had to stop. I felt like I was cheating on her with a Spanish version of her. While we were in the season of making children Bonnie made it more clear to me that she was serious about wanting to move the kids out of country to Mexico so they could have an immersion experience not unlike her six months living in Spain. After a while I leaned into this idea and we decided the best time to go would be during our oldest child’s fourth grade year because when we get back she will have one more year in grade school instead of being plunged into middle school.

So many pieces have had to fall into place to get us to where we are right now and we will blog on that during the course of this adventure with our children. So many decisions had to be made, so many doors had to open for this to happen. On January 15, 2020 our family of six will be flying to Mexico to live there for six months. This adventure will be chronicled here on this blog. Our six months abroad.

My wife and I have been in a dating relationship for 23 years (high school sweethearts), married for 15, and have been parents for 9. We have four children ages 9,8,6, and 4. This blog will detail our adventure to live in Mexico for the next six months.