The final days before doing an international move are always really painful for me, both emotionally and physically. I hate endings, so I am always sad about leaving and all of the lasts. I always have more things to do than I can possibly accomplish. I never sleep. It is just seemly endless and unpleasant. I loathe the final days. As the plane takes off, though, I can literally feel myself shedding the weight of all of it.
And that's all behind me now, and I'm just so happy. I'm sitting on the patio of our condo in Florida with a glass of red wine and my laptop. The sky is clear and a full moon is shining softly down on us, as a warm wind blows through the palm trees next to me. The quiet hum of the building's air conditioning compressor purrs below me, almost drowning out the sounds of the kids that are still in the pool. Our girls are asleep after spending literally five straight hours in the pool/pool slide/lazy river. Tomorrow we are going to the Magic Kingdom. It's just so heavenly to be able to just chill out.
Our nanny is with us, and it's honestly so much fun to show her our country and to see it through her eyes. She can't get over how little traffic there is and how much green space there is, and how inexpensive everything is at Walmart. She's about my age, and she's raised four kids on her own in a big city on next to no money, and she's never been much further than 50 miles outside that city. I am trying to give her as much free time as I can to just enjoy the experience and spend some time on her own. It's probably been 20 years since she did anything for herself. I know she needs the break, and once we start work again, it will be hectic and we're going to need her to do more. I want her to have a little bit of time for herself to just have a vacation.
In other news, the second school that we got into agreed to extend the registration deadline for us until the end of the week, so we are going to be able to do a tour then and see which school we prefer. After everything that happened last year to us (which I haven't really blogged about, but needless to say, it was bad, and involved making a decision based on limited information), I realized that even if we don't decide to change schools, I really need to see the second one and feel like I've explored all of my options and made the best choice possible. I've really been blaming myself for not doing that last year, even though maybe we would have made the same choice. But I need to know that I am making the right choice based on all of the information available to me. So, at the end of the week we will go and check it out and see what we think, and I am so thankful to have that opportunity.
It is SO nice to be back in America, the land of rubberized playground surfaces and endless varieties of jarred tomato sauce and clean air and good cheese and inexpensive wine. America, I've missed you.
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