The Day We Left

We have officially flown the coop! 🦅 Today is the day we left. Can you even believe this is what we’ve done? One thing that has come up a number of times that always seems to surprise me is when people say this is “brave”. I never once stopped to consider how brave this actually is. Yes, it’s uncomfortable and unknown but I was reluctant to wear a badge of “brave”. I’ve considered this over the last month quite thoughtfully and decided I will wear that word with pride. We ARE brave!

The last few days have certainly been a whirlwind. We had made plans to physically move out of our house on Monday. We had the sea can in the driveway and we had much of the house boxed up. We used very good movers to help us play Tetrus in the sea can, but to no avail everything did NOT fit! We were SCRAMBLING! We called around to storage facilities and couldn’t believe that we would pay $153 for a 10 x 10 storage unit but the entire sea can was costing us $125 per month!! Yikes! Thankfully, good friends of ours had some space to spare on their acreage so the rest of our contents went there.

Kevin and I have decided owning a storage facility would be a license to print money! Haha

So as things weren’t going according to plan, the girls were at each others throats AND bored out of their skulls! I felt bad for them because it was zero fun watching us get things done. Grandpa saved the day and took them in the morning and then the hung out in the afternoon with us. Tuesday, with the rest of the contents to deal with, my friend Devi so graciously took the girls to the spray park and skate park while we loaded and cleaned like crazy. Kevin’s friend Ben also came to help and we are grateful to all three of these people for helping us finish up!! 💖

The next stressful part was definitely moving INTO the fifth. We have/had a lot of stuff and even though we purged and paired down, I was worried we wouldn’t find a home for everything. Praise the Lord we seem to have!

Wednesday, we ran errands and dropped off the last forgotten library book, an umbrella to one, a laminator to the other, picked up meds, Nola was at a sleepover and needed picking up in Blackfalds, we got a new windshield and decals on the truck, plus we rented a car to do the errands and had to return that! And one last goodbye from special friends, then dinner at another’s! We slept like rocks last night!

This morning we woke up and finished the trailer tidy. Grandpa Sandy came for a final goodbye and shortly after my folks made a surprise appearance to see us off. Tears were shed and that pit in my stomach started to form. Goodbyes are hard. When we said goodbye to Oma yesterday (I forgot to put that on my list above!) she/we shed tears too and as she said, “Be careful and come back.” 😘

We pulled out of the Westerner in Red Deer about noon—a terrible time to get going because this always results in A&W for lunch. Now some of you may have seen on social media that Heidi has tested positive for a dairy intolerance. Food is so difficult for me but out family is going to do our best to get that out of our diet. I’m certainly not the kind of person who can just say, “oh, that’s bad for me, I won’t eat it.” Nope! Not me! I’m full of head games and excuses. Its hard!! Do you agree or are you a black and white person?!

Today we only traveled as far as Medicine Hat and honestly that was hard enough. Between the girls, Heidi is much more spirited. She is sassy and can be quite rude; she’s pushing her boundaries. The uncertainty hasn’t helped. Today the girls were at each others throats and it was exhausting! ALL the live long day, if Nola said white the gloves came off because Heidi was saying black. I can see the adjustment process hard at work here – Nola is still awake sitting at the table with me right now… it’s 11:05pm… 😫

As for Kevin and I, we are a bit in vacation mode right now. We are feeling pretty happy and easy about everything, but reality hasn’t fully hit us. It’s fresh and exciting and not quite real. I wonder what this will look like in three months from now.

Tonight, we saw a cute little hare in our campsite. It was the smallest one I’d every seen! It must have just been born this spring because compared to the Red Deer ones, this one was a little teenager. We immediately named it Bun Bun and threw it carrots #badtourists . He hopped around and made himself comfortable. It was a lovely and welcome distraction to the yelling and frustration #justbeinghonest .

We are on to Moosejaw tomorrow. Hopefully we can pop in to see an old Aunt and Uncle of mine in Swift Current. Hopefully tomorrow will be less of “she’s looking out my window!” craziness. 😜

Oh, and before I forget, for those of you who read my last post, the sparrow birds have moved on and are no longer nested in the hitch. Praise Jesus they figured it out and moved on to something safer. 🐦

xo Jmac

Post Script, don't forget to check out my Facebook and Insta Stories to keep up on our day to day activities. On Facebook I'm just me and on Insta I am @macleods.on.the.move