Preparation

Whew!  Life is crazy for us right now, in the last month before moving to Shanghai for what should be 3 years.  We are helping our youngest daughter get ready to move into Cornell University in Ithaca, NY, for her first year of college.  We are helping our middle daughter, a junior at Emory University in Atlanta, get ready for her fall semester abroad in Vienna, Austria.  We are trying to sell our Elmhurst, IL home in order to purchase a new, forever, home in the Watkins Glen, NY area to be home base.  And we just picked out our apartment in the Green City area of the Pudong district, in Shanghai, China.

I hope to spend some of my time in Asia keeping a blog, as I did when we lived in Frankfurt, Germany in 2006-2008.  I'd also like to write a book, although I'm still uncertain where that will take me.  But, at least, a blog is a place to start and to keep track of our travels through Asia.

While we have signed a 1-year lease on our apartment in Shanghai and hope to be there for at least the 2 years that my nephew, his wife and 3 kids are in Shanghai, there is every possibility we will relocate to Hong Kong before our stay in Asia is over.  My husband travels extensively throughout southeast Asia, including China, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia, India, and, eventually, Australia.  I hope to go with him on many of these trips, so I plan to post pictures and stories of our travels throughout the area.  I think this move will be new, exciting, challenging, exhausting, eye-opening, enriching, and surreal. I will miss seeing my daughters, but given that the youngest is heading off to college and none of them would live at home, even in the U.S., I would be missing them no matter where I am.  I plan to be in Asia part-time, being at home with my youngest two when they are on winter and summer breaks from college.  And whenever I'm in the U.S., I plan to see my oldest daughter, who lives in NYC, as often as possible.

I will miss my family, but I haven't lived very near any of them since I went off to Cornell myself in 1979, so that's not really anything new either.  It will be great to be living only a few blocks away from my nephew and his family in Shanghai - I'm really excited to be able to see them often and get to be a part of their children's lives.  I also think we'll get a lot more family visiting us with them nearby.  :)

I will also miss our sweet little dog, Jinny, a 9-year-old Cavalier King Charles Spaniel.  She isn't up to the plane rides back and forth to Asia and the U.S., nor the quarantine involved in transitioning between countries, so we're having to give her away to a new family.  As long as we return to Elmhurst, we'll be able to visit her, but her sweet disposition and very low maintenance has made her a wonderful companion since we returned from Germany 5 years ago and I'll be lonely without her.

All-in-all, it's a life-changing year in our family.  My oldest daughter is moving apartments in NYC, my middle daughter is headed off to a semester in Austria, and my youngest is starting college.  We're planning to sell the home we've lived in since 1997 and leave Illinois, where we've been since 1991, except for the 2 years in Frankfurt.  While I'm very excited at the idea of our U.S. home base being back in my hometown, I haven't lived there since I was 17 and will have to develop a whole new social and volunteer life when I'm there, but it will only be part-time.  And, of course, to pick up and move to Asia is huge.  The best part of it all is that I will be able to be living with my husband most of the time, rather than only 25% of the time, as it has been for the past 2 years.  We'll be together when I'm in Asia and at least some of the time that I'm in the U.S.  He's excited not only to have me there but also to have a home in Asia, as he's been living in different hotels all over southeastern Asia for the past 2 years and is really tired of the nomad life.  It seems unlikely that he'll be assigned to a job back in the U.S. full-time at any point in the rest of his career, so this arrangement will probably be the reality of our life for the next 15 years or so, whether our part-time home is in Asia, Europe, South America, etc.  Who knows what adventures lie ahead!

Thank you for coming along with me on this next step in our life adventures.  I have to pause and think of my mother, who wanted to travel the world but never really made it further outside of the U.S. than Bermuda.  I like to think she would be really excited for me and will be coming along on all of these travels with us.