Archive | military life

portraits of my children {24/52} + living with less

June 20, 2014 at 2:52 pm

The 52 Project: A portrait of my children once a week + every week in 2014.

Lena: I’ve been working off and on all week on a post about all the things Lena and I do together for our morning “preschool”: crafts, games, toys, learning activities, and so on. (This makes me sound much more organized than I am! I’ll just enjoy that for a second.) The post is almost ready and will go up next week, but in the meantime you get a sneak peak of this morning’s play/school time.

In the photo: “Hello, this is Dr. Lena,” she had just reported into her toy phone, “We need some more medicine because Mama’s got a stiiiiinky headache.” I love my future nurse/doctor/ veterinarian/skyisthelimit so much.

Gil: Hello empty house!!! As my Instagram friends will already know, the movers came yesterday and cleared out our house. Our personal items (minus almost all furniture… read here to see why) are on their way to San Diego. The movers left us with only a few sticks of furniture we still hope to sell, enough dishes and toys to last us a month, and suitcases with clothing and books that will travel with us from Sicily to San Diego in July. We’ll be relying on loaner furniture from the military base until we fly out of Sicily on July 15.

So far I’m loving this cleared out, refreshingly empty house. I vacuumed and mopped the whole thing yesterday and it feels cleaner and lighter and simpler than it ever has. This will be our experiment in living with less, and I think we’re going to enjoy it. I’ll report back later!

——–

And now TGIF! I just finished this hilarious novel and dove headfirst into this NYT food critic’s tale. I’m also hoping a trip to the pool and the beach are in our weekend plans, if we’re lucky! What are you up to this weekend?

2 :: in 52 project, military life

We have a house in San Diego!

June 9, 2014 at 9:31 pm

We’ve been praying about a home in San Diego for months now, and it is such an amazing relief to finally have a home to go to, and address to count on, and a future within those four walls to imagine as our own! I get a little giddy whenever I think about this house and all the plans and dreams that come with it.

Here’s a little bit about how we are making this house work (budget-wise) and some of our dreams for our life there… along with a few photos from a realtor’s phone!

Elliott actually toured this house last month when he was in San Diego for work. At that point it was way out of our budget, and he didn’t even tell me about it until he noticed that the owners had lowered the rent.

As we scrolled through the pictures, I fell in love. Compared to the dozens of small, cramped, dark places we’d looked at online, this house was flooded with natural daylight. I loved the crisp contrast of the light walls, ceiling, and kitchen with the dark wood floor. I could imagine us fitting right in there, living and working and laughing and hosting in that spacious, open main room.

There are two unique features of this house. One is that the owners listed it as a furnished rental. This is actually not uncommon in Coronado, where owners will rent vacation homes to long-term tenants. The owners of this place might have been willing to move their furniture out, but they didn’t really want to have to do that.

In the end we decided to sell our furniture here in Sicily and rent this home with its furniture. This was really my preference. I like the way this house is decorated, and I am not sure our furniture would fit with its aesthetic. Besides, I bought most of our current furniture on Craigslist before moving here, and I am not emotionally attached to it. I feel like my/our styles are evolving, and I would rather let everything go now, live lightly, and then put time and thought into a home we care more about in a few years.

(What do you think? Am I crazy? Would you ever sell all your furniture and start again?)

The other unique feature of the property was the “tea house,” a stand-alone cottage on the property with a pull-out couch, bathroom, and kitchenette.

“Maybe we could rent it out on AirBnB,” Elliott suggested. A quick search of other AirBnB properties in the neighborhood revealed that we’d probably have no problem filling the tea house for a week or so every month.

“And I’ve always wanted to run a B&B,” I said, getting excited.

But then we had the brilliant idea to ask my dad if he’d be interested in renting the tea house instead. My dad works right outside San Diego two weeks every month, and he had already planned to rent a place closer to the city so that he could see us when he was in town. The tea house would mean a longer commute for him, but he’d be close to us, and my mom (who travels with him pretty frequently) would be right with us whenever she came to visit, too.

My dad didn’t have to think about it very long.

“Will the owners take out that pull-out couch if I bring my own bed?”

YES.

“OK, let’s do it!”

the Tea House

Now we had a hard decision to make. We loved this house, but we had two other homes offered to us at the same time. One was a town house, and the other was an apartment in a small condo building. Both of these homes were located in the heart of Coronado, and both cost a lot less each month in rent.

For a week, we negotiated, prayed, sought counsel, and talked. We talked about it so much that it became a running joke at the dinner table.

Me: “This house just seems to fit so much with our dreams and priorities as a family: hospitality, being outdoors, living near or with extended family….”

Elliott: “But I know we can do all those things in a smaller space, like we did in D.C. in our studio apartment when we first got married. We had dinner guests every week there even if they had to sit on the bed to eat.”

Gil: “Maaaaaaaama. Uh oh.”

*something crashes in the background*

Lena: “So what are you guys talking about?”

Me, laughing: “What do you think, Lena?”

Lena: “Our house in San Diego?”

Elliott: “Yep….”

[we won’t be keeping the flat screen!]

Spending more on rent was hard for us, because we’re really thrifty people and are careful to live within our means. Other than our mortgage on my studio in D.C., we’re debt-free, and we generally examine every angle (freebies, hand-me-downs, living without, coupons, discounts, airline miles, hotel points, etc.) before we spend money. We can afford this house, but it will mean less in savings for us for three years.

But we also don’t want to live forever waiting for “someday.” Someday we’ll have a home that we actually want to invite people over to. Someday we’ll try to live close to our extended family. Someday we’ll make the sacrifices to prioritize what we say really matters to us.

When we stepped back and looked at the broader picture, we realized that this house is exactly what we’d been hoping to find in Coronado.

Home large enough to host traveling family and friends (even whole families!)
Indoor/outdoor space that we could offer as a gathering place to our future church, Bible study, and new local friends
Space for siblings to live with us if they decide to move to California (as one is seriously considering)
Home where my dad could live with us part time (huge huge bonus!!!)
A peaceful place filled with natural light where we can learn, read, play, and live together as a family

And so, with some fear and trembling, we signed the lease!

Once the actual commitment was made, I felt enormous joy and thankfulness. This home is, in so many ways, the home we’d dreamed about when we thought about living in San Diego. It’s just a mile and a half from Elliott’s new office, and he’s planning to bike or run every day. It’s a mile from two beaches, and it’s less than half a mile from the commercial heart of Coronado, the beautiful library, and Spreckels Park.

Elliott is really excited about his work, and I am really excited about continuing another chapter of creative, hospitality-focused motherhood, so we both feel like we have so much to look forward to in our everyday lives there. We’ll live simply — we have to! — but we will be in a neighborhood where we hardly ever have to get in the car, where people live outdoors most of the year, and where we already have connections that we are excited to turn into friendships.

This season in Sicily has been filled with blessings but also hardships. I know these will continue in this next phase of life, and I know we can’t even imagine some of the gifts and the heartaches that lie around the corner.

Elliott and I were reading Pilgrim’s Progress last night, and we came to the chapter where Christian and Hopeful are trapped in Doubting Castle and can’t find a way out. Suddenly, after days of beatings and starvation, Christian remembers the key named Promise hanging around his neck. Within seconds, that key unlocks the gates to the pilgrims’ freedom.

There is the obvious lesson here that we need to remember God’s promises in order to be released from times of doubt, depression, and discouragement. But there’s also a more subtle message that if Christian had been remembering God’s faithfulness, he would have remembered that key around his neck much sooner and would have been long gone from Doubting Castle.

We’ve been given so many blessings, and I’m sure this house will be a great blessing to us in a lot of ways. But I know there will be hard times, painful relationships, and deep misunderstandings in this house, too. As we leave Sicily and prepare to move to this new house and city, I want to remind myself often of God’s faithfulness, God’s goodness, God’s promises to me and to my family.

We have a history with this God. A good history. He who promised is faithful, and He will remain so!

“See, I am sending an angel ahead of you to guard you along the way
and to bring you to the place I have prepared.”
Exodus 23:20

42 :: in Coronado, home sweet home, hospitality, military life

Unplugging and Restarting Your Parenting Overseas (or Right Where You Are!)

May 19, 2014 at 7:40 pm

When I told my dad we were moving to a foreign country, he said: “I think this is so good. You guys are young. You can go away and establish yourselves as a family, work out your priorities, without a lot of family nearby and outside influences. This is a great, great opportunity for you, and I am so happy for you.”

I’ve thought about that a thousand times since we moved to Sicily three years ago. My parents raised my siblings and me overseas, so he spoke from a depth of experience. He knew that anyone who lives overseas has a choice. You will be isolated, you will be lonely, you will be overwhelmed, you will be foreign.

But.

You can use the isolation for your benefit. You can take advantage of the distance from the influences that affect your peers. You can reevaluate your priorities, establish new habits, build a foundation for your family. You can train the crew of your little ship so that when the world’s fancies sway this way and that, you can still hold steady to your goals.

For us, Sicily was where our parenting started. Lena was just three months old when our plane landed in Italy. Also, I quit my job when we left the States, and I couldn’t immediately find work here. (You can read about that difficult transition here.)

After I accepted my new status as a full-time mom instead of a full-time nurse, I sat down and thought about the kind of mom I wanted to be, especially as a stay-at-home mom. This move gave us a chance to establish ourselves as parents and as a family and to decide what our priorities would be.

These were the priorities we have established here:

We want to read.

A lot. We love to read, thanks to parents who raised us on a steady diet of great literature. My husband and I read an average of 50 books a year on our own, and we read at least four books a day to each of our kids.

One trick to reading a lot is to surround yourself (and your kids) with good books. There are [piles of] books all over our home, and I recently calculated that we have about 100 board books and 150 picture books. Plenty to keep both the readers and the listeners interested in the stories!

(Note to moms trying to build their home libraries: try library book sales. I’ve filled boxes with children’s books at library sales in the States and then shipped them back to us overseas with the super-cheap, super-slow Media Mail option.)

We want to cook our own clean, healthy food.

We live in a small town in rural Sicily, and we have to drive at least 30 minutes to get good ethnic (ie. not Italian) food. We enjoy going out to a restaurant once a month or so – usually for incredible wood-fired pizza in our town – but it’s stressful with little kids. So… in Sicily, if we want to eat, we kind of have to cook.

And cook we do! Thanks to dearth of restaurants and a cornucopia of produce, I’ve finally gotten the crash course in basic home cooking that I so desperately needed… oh, when I went to college. I do our dry-goods shopping at the U.S. grocery store on base, and then we try to purchase most of the perishable items — fruits, vegetables, cheese, seafood — at the market or in town. Sicily makes this easy.

I’ve watched my friend Rachel beautifully transform the food culture in her home since moving here. Here’s what she said about living and cooking in Sicily:

“Not having the fast food option has helped me to learn to embrace cooking. I’ve always enjoyed it, but having such easy (and cheap) access to incredible fresh ingredients has motivated me to search out ways to cook them. On top of that, I’ve loved having my kids in the kitchen with me! … Mussels and artichokes are their favorites these days. (Isn’t that crazy?! We can’t believe it, either!) We love knowing that we’re laying a foundation of healthy eating for them!”

We don’t want TV to be a big deal in our home.

By that I mean that we want to spend more time doing other things, and we don’t want our kids sitting in front of screens. For now, our family does not own a TV. Our kids don’t expect movies or computer time; we just fill our days with other activities. We don’t think this is a permanent choice (both Elliott and I grew up with — and loved — family movie nights), but it’s right for us during this season.

I’d like to blog more about this soon, but in the meantime, Amanda wrote an amazing blog post about living without a TV during their three years in Japan. I highly recommend it!

We don’t want to spend a lot of time on our computers or phones in front of our kids.

I wrote more about my decisions to limit my iPhone usage here. (Elliott doesn’t own a smartphone right now, so it’s a lot easier for him!)

I loved my friend Sarah’s comment on that blog post because it shows how Sicily has helped her unplug and restart her parenting as well:

“Since moving to Sicily it has been very freeing to be in a different time zone where social media is not buzzing in the phone…. I have found that also I get frustrated with my kids if I’m distracted by my phone because they’re not allowing me to “focus.” I have noticed that and have now made a point to only check FB and email in the mornings, nap time, and the evenings…. It allows me to be a mother and wife who is present.”

Amen to that! I only wish it were more true of me.

We want to explore alternative employment.

I sell handmade crafts, do copy editing work for my dad’s organization, and blog… and earn a few dollars a month. ;) It’s ok; earning money is not my primary focus right now. I’m enjoying this chance to explore other fields besides nursing during these years so that I have a better idea of my skills and interests (and so I keep developing both of those!) whenever I re-enter the workforce.

Elliott has also enjoyed “building a platform” that might lead to another career down the road. He established a website and podcast while he was here called “The Uncommon Veterinarian.” He also is almost finished with his first novel, a monumental feat of dedication.

We want to stay connected to family back home.

We Skype with family on weekend afternoons, and my blog is a big way to stay connected to our family and invite them into our lives. We also love it when they visit us here!

We want to open our home to visitors.

We love having family and friends come to stay, and we’ve tried to make that a priority in our lives by always having an available guest room, a pretty open schedule, and a welcome invitation to anyone who would like to come.

This year we’ve had week-long visitors every month since October, and we try to open our home regularly for dinners, play dates, and game nights, too. It’s all a part of our life-goal of making room… hence the name of this blog!

We want to spend time outdoors.

That’s why we chose a house that had a whole green valley for a backyard. Except in the summertime, we take the kids on a hike about every week. Often Elliott will take the kids for a walk as soon as he gets home from work and while I’m cooking dinner. They meander down to the piazza and come back with fresh bread and wine to accompany our meal, or sometimes they walk farther to a farm near our house.

——–

For those of us in Sicily – or living anywhere overseas – this is a rare opportunity. Living overseas is an adventure, and there are definitely extra challenges with the distance from family and smaller community and resources. But don’t forget that the community is (usually) ready-made and eager to welcome you; resources are often plentiful and free; and you live in a beautiful-in-its-own-way, once-in-a-lifetime location.

Of course, unplugging and restarting your parenting — or your life! — is important to do wherever you are whenever you need to do it, whether you’re in Bahrain or Boston, Iceland or Indianapolis, Venezuela or Vancouver. Certainly there are more resources and more diversity when you’re in a major Western metropolis. I want our family’s priorities and goals to be something we constantly remember, re-evaluate, and re-prioritize no matter where we live.

Now it’s your turn! Before you had a family of your own, how did you picture your family? How did you envision yourselves spending weekends, evenings, and holidays? What did you think your priorities would be?

If you’re single, how did you picture yourself at this age? Are your priorities in the right place?

And now: what baby steps could you take to help yourself get there? Here are some suggestions (most of which I could really apply to my life!):

Waking up 15 minutes earlier to pack a healthy lunch for yourself, or to get a shower in before the kids are up. (I didn’t do that this morning and wish I had….)
Going home next weekend to spend time with your parents.
Finally making a budget and sticking to it.
Reading one book this month that you’ve always wanted to read. Maybe a short classic like My Antonia, or a beautiful memoir like The Dirty Life, or a great piece of new fiction like What Alice Forgot.
Making a meal plan this week (just four meals, and use the leftovers for other meals) and shopping for the ingredients.
Setting a goal of something to do with your kids today, like reading one book to each of them, or building a blanket fort instead of letting them watch TV, or making homemade play dough in fun colors.

OK, enough talking. What do you think of all this? How can you unplug and restart your parenting right where you are? You guys inspire me! I can’t wait to hear what you have to say!

25 :: in Becoming a Stay-at-Home Mom Series, family, Italy, military life, motherhood, Sicily, thoughts

bread + wine + kids + travel

May 12, 2014 at 3:36 pm

I took this photo in our Paris apartment on a quiet afternoon that Elliott and I spent reading and sipping hot, milked-down espresso as the kids slept. (In other words… that afternoon was heaven on earth!)

The other day Lena and I were sitting on the couch together, as we often do during Gil’s morning nap. We finished reading picture books together, and she started coloring. I turned back to Bread and Wine, a book I find myself reading slowly, savoring, and then caught up in irresistibly, reading faster than I intend, but unable to put down for the sheer joy and beauty of each honest story, each delicious food, each life lesson, that the author shares.

I had come to the chapter innocuously titled “Delicious Everywhere,” and I was totally roped in because she was writing about traveling and eating around the world, two things near and dear to my heart.

And then boom. I hit these last two paragraphs of the chapter, and my heart started to sing in my chest. Every line felt like it was written just for me, a perfect description of everything I feel and act upon in my life, said in a way I’ve always been struggling to find.

And right there, on the couch, in the middle of the morning, I began to cry.

“Sometimes people ask me why I travel so much, and specifically why we travel with [our little kids] so often. I think they think it’s easier to keep the kids at home, in their routines, surrounded by their stuff. It is. But we travel because it’s there. Because Capri exists and Kenya exists and Tel Aviv exists, and I want to taste every bite of it. We travel because I want my kids to learn, as I learned, that there are a million ways to live, a million ways to eat, a million ways to dress and speak and view the world. I want them to know that “our way” isn’t the right way, but just one way, that children all over the world, no matter how different they seem, are just like the children in our neighborhood — they love to play, to discover, to learn.

“I want my kids to learn firsthand and up close that different isn’t bad, but instead that different is exciting and wonderful and worth taking the time to understand. I want them to see themselves as bit players in a huge, sweeping, beautiful play, not as the main characters in the drama of our living room. I want my kids to taste and smell and experience the biggest possible world, because every bite of it, every taste and texture and flavor, is delicious.” (emphasis mine)

I don’t yet understand why I love living and traveling overseas so much. Yes, I did grow up mostly overseas, but I didn’t always love it, and when we moved back to the States and I went to college, I was so ready. I was so done with living overseas. I loved living in Virginia and Boston and D.C. for a few years.

But then — as soon as the opportunity presented itself — I couldn’t wait to live overseas again. As Elliott will tell you, we’re living in Italy now because he let me choose where we could live next, and I chose Italy.

And, to be honest, I have really mixed emotions about moving back to the States for our new life in CA. Earlier this spring, Elliott interviewed for a job that would have sent us to Tbilisi, in the Republic of Georgia, and a big part of me longed for him to get that job, for us to plunge headfirst into yet another culture, another language, another city map, another international church, another home away from home.

I am sure there are many sinful emotions tied up in my love of living and traveling and being overseas. There’s pride and a desire for adventure and a longing to be different.

But there’s also a love for it. Learning the road rules, the food cultures, the hand gestures, the clothing staples, the housing quirks, and the right way to check out in a grocery store… I love all that. No matter where I am in the world, I get a thrill from learning these everyday communication techniques, learning how to fit in like a local, learning how to blend my family’s culture and the country’s culture.

And so, because of all these tied-to-my-heartstrings reasons, I’ve loved this chance to birth one of my children and raise two of them — at least for a little while — in another country. Together, Elliott and I encouraged and taught and watched them experience and savor this overseas life too. We watched them play with children for hours who didn’t speak their language, watched their eyes light up with delight over foods we can’t find in the States, watched them hike mountains and swim in oceans and walk on streets where no one else shares their nationality.

Our children’s acceptance and fascination with all we teach them — “this is good” or “this is different” or “this is home” — is a privilege given to parents. For this season of life, I’m so glad that we could teach them that home includes buying olives and eggplants at the market each week, and a handyman who speaks only Italian, and the unbending rule that you must say “grazie” after someone does something kind.

I hope we can continue to welcome the world into our home, in California and beyond, through food, visitors, books, and discussions around the dinner table. I worry that I will become complacent, or that I’ll forget. I fear — because I know my weaknesses — that I’ll become comfortable with familiar and forget the beauty and challenge of living so close to the ground in another culture. I hope I won’t forget.

And I hope it won’t be too long before we pack our bags and move overseas again for awhile. Oh please, God, don’t let it be too long.

Have you ever left a life overseas, and do you long to go back? Any encouragement for someone about to make the transition to the States?

21 :: in good reads, military life, thoughts, travel

Where We’re Headed Next: San Diego!!!

May 1, 2014 at 9:09 pm

Image via

I think it’s time for an official “what happens after Sicily?” update around here! My husband Elliott wrote a blog post this week about our next move, and there are a lot of juicy details in that about rejections and deliberations that lead to our final decision: after we leave Sicily in July, we’re headed to the beaches and bustle of San Diego, California!

Some of you might remember this post about the difficult decision we were making between D.C. and San Diego. Most of our family lives in D.C., and we lived there as newlyweds. After this summer, Elliott had been planning to get out of the military and find work in the D.C. area so we could spend more time with them for a year or two.

However, somewhat out of the blue in December, the Army offered him a dream job. Would he be interested in filling a new position that just opened up for a veterinarian with the Naval Special Warfare Command, home of the SEALs?

For more than 10 years, Elliott had dreamed of a job like this: a chance to work with the elite of the world’s military, to care for their working dogs, and maybe even to work with their dolphins and sea lions. His eyes lit up whenever he talked about it. We both couldn’t imagine how he could turn this down.

After lots of conversations with family and lots of time on our knees, we decided to take the job!

One of the things we’re most excited about is the location of Elliott’s new base: the beautiful peninsula of Coronado just off the coast of San Diego. I’ve only been to SD twice on quick visits, but both times included an obligatory trip to Coronado to admire its long white beaches, darling cottages, picturesque shops, and famous hotel.

Working in Coronado will be amazing, but living there would be a dream come true. Unfortunately, Coronado housing is proving to be a bit of a problem. (Anyone who knows Coronado has a wry smile on their face right now.) The rental market is extremely competitive, and so even though Elliott has been super proactive about looking for a home, so far we’re still on the hunt.

Another option we’re prayerfully considering is living in a completely different part of the city, closer to the church we’ll probably attend. There are a lot of unknowns, so it’s hard to make such lifestyle-determining decisions from thousands of miles away. If you’re the praying kind, we’d appreciate your prayers!

We’ll leave Sicily in July, visit family along the way, and arrive in California the first week of August. But as I type this, there are brownies in the oven, and still-sandy swimsuits drying outside, and Jonathan and Erika — our latest visitors — are sharing the couch with Elliott. There is absolutely no sign that we have less than three months left in this beautiful home in Italy.

I’m excited about what lies ahead, but for now . . . the kitchen timer is going off, and I’m ready for hot brownies with our guests. Let’s savor “making room in Sicily” for a little longer!