Last Friday, five very friendly but total strangers came into our house and packed up all our belongings onto this container, which is now making it's way slowly to Tanzania ahead of us!
On Tuesday this week, we handed over the keys to the place we have called 'home' for the last three years. Now in it's empty, shell-type form, it can be described as a house again until someone else fills it with their belongings and makes their own memories there.
Later the same day we flew from Ohio to London via Toronto ... and now we are living between our parents houses and various other locations until we move to Tanzania in February.
Transition is never straight forward, whether it's in the details of the packing, travel arrangements, living with just of a small selection of your belongings, adjusting to time zones, helping little people understand what's going on, taking in yourself that one chunk of your life is over and waiting for the next one to begin.
In some ways I'd expected all those things and I had also anticipated that however well prepared we were, it was not all going to be plain sailing ... like when the shipping people told us that not everything was going to fit in the container and we had to pick out what we 'didn't want to take with us' or when the girls are extra cranky as they try in their own little ways to assimilate what's going on ... and many other little gems!
But it wasn't until we were just about to board the plane on Tuesday and were spending a last few moments with a really good friend before saying our goodbye's, that it actually dawned on me ... technically, as a family, we are currently homeless. How strange! The securities that we all work towards for our loved ones, have been stripped away for these few months at least.
When in her tiredness Abigail says to me 'I want to go home', I have to reply that for now we don't have one. She knows that all our things are on a boat to Africa and we will settle once again but for now we are living in other people's homes and are grateful that our family looks after us so well until we have a 'home' of our own again!
If you are friends from England ... check out our family blog post, Back in the UK for more information of where we're going to be and when over the next couple of months.
Transition is never straight forward, whether it's in the details of the packing, travel arrangements, living with just of a small selection of your belongings, adjusting to time zones, helping little people understand what's going on, taking in yourself that one chunk of your life is over and waiting for the next one to begin.
In some ways I'd expected all those things and I had also anticipated that however well prepared we were, it was not all going to be plain sailing ... like when the shipping people told us that not everything was going to fit in the container and we had to pick out what we 'didn't want to take with us' or when the girls are extra cranky as they try in their own little ways to assimilate what's going on ... and many other little gems!
But it wasn't until we were just about to board the plane on Tuesday and were spending a last few moments with a really good friend before saying our goodbye's, that it actually dawned on me ... technically, as a family, we are currently homeless. How strange! The securities that we all work towards for our loved ones, have been stripped away for these few months at least.
When in her tiredness Abigail says to me 'I want to go home', I have to reply that for now we don't have one. She knows that all our things are on a boat to Africa and we will settle once again but for now we are living in other people's homes and are grateful that our family looks after us so well until we have a 'home' of our own again!
If you are friends from England ... check out our family blog post, Back in the UK for more information of where we're going to be and when over the next couple of months.
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