Things you do in the ten days prior to a 5-month international family trip:

• Tell your kid to please get out of the tree, since we can’t have any broken arms this week.
• Pray your husband is safe with the big tools during his last week of work, since we also cannot have any lost appendages this week.
• Proudly finish knitting the first sweater you’ve made for your husband only to find out it’s backwards. Wonder what else you’ve done wrong in this craziness that you don’t yet know about. On the knitting front, make sure to have another sweater project going that you’re trying to finish before you leave.
• Work frantically to get the garden cleaned up and tilled. We’re coming back just in time for spring gardening season, so of course we must be ready! Now if only I could start peppers and onions remotely…
• Reconfigure the garage to store another car.
• Ignore the children for long stretches of time – sanity is at a premium right now.
• Bump up the caffeine intake. Start this tomorrow.
• Clean the septic filter. Change the house water filter. Change the drinking water filter. Change the reverse osmosis membrane.
• Take a hilarious video of your toddler showing off a new skill: picking his nose and eating it too!
• Attempt to read about an entire country and plan six weeks of lodging in a few days.
• Definitely find time to keep working through Season 6 of The Office. (This started as a trade. I agreed to watch as many minutes as Nic listened to of a parenting podcast of my choice. Now I’m a convert, I guess.)
• That French job – mow zee lawn. (Grandpa Hendrychs joke)
• Purchase the equipment for a new hobby after just recently setting yourself up for another new hobby. You won’t be able to take either of these hobbies on the trip, but you know you have them and can at least daydream. (Reader, this was not the writer.)
• Give your oldest child the role of lunchtime barista. This is a great arrangement – I make lunch; she makes my iced latte.
• Dismantle and “fix” that precious espresso maker several times. Of course this is a priority.
• Deep-clean your daughters’ bedroom. I cannot emphasize enough: this is the absolute worst task on this list. I’d rather take the whole family for vaccines.
• Take the whole family in for those last vaccines. Doesn’t that sound fun?
• Organize all the closets in the house.
• Buy lots and lots of dog, cat, and chicken food. Think they’ll all survive if we just cut the bags open and leave them out where they can find them? Just kidding!
• Accomplish all the usual tasks with minimal grace and style: endless piles of laundry, homeschooling multiple kids, too many conversations about putting pee only where it belongs, refereeing about a thousand arguments, wiping poopy butts, fixing all the things the kids took apart this week, etc.

So if my mind is scattered as I resume my short-lived blogging career, forgive me.

One week from today, our family of six embarks on a 5-month European jaunt, our Sabbatical 2.0. Nic and I decided about a decade ago that we would try to take a sabbatical every seven years. We took our last sabbatical in 2017, extending the process of moving to Montana into a 9-month roadtrip in a crappy RV. You can still peruse all the old content. At the beginning of that trip, I wrote about the sabbatical year concept. Read about it here. We are a year overdue for our second sabbatical, but we’ve been a little busy adding four humans to this crazy world and doing our best to keep them alive.

When we took our first trip, so many people told us we were smart to do it while we could, i.e., before having kids. This chafed our stubborn, willful personalities. Neither of us enjoys being told what we can and cannot do. So here we are, doing it, with four children. Of course it will be crazy and ridiculous and difficult, but our daily life is all of those things as well, even on a good day.

We are so pleased that you are spending a few precious minutes reading about our journey. With limited time and brain power, we will do our best to keep you updated on our whereabouts, share some photos of what we’re seeing, write about the logistics of doing this type of thing with four kids 7 and under, and provide plenty of crazy stories of the ridiculous things that will doubtless occur. It’s going to be a wild ride. Thank you for joining us!