Well, Well, Well...

Life has an amazing way of throwing you some twists and turns, a few curve balls, and then breaking out in all-out adventure!

I started the year with the complete intention of blogging every day or at least several times a WEEK - not letting MONTHS go by!!!!  But, you know, that little thing called life?  Yeah.

So let's backtrack to the end of January...all of a sudden I was so very tired, too tired to keep up with my tiny humans, our daily life, our house, and this little old blog.  And there is only one thing that ever means for me - we were so excited to welcoming Sproutlet #5 into our lives!  We were surprised a bit but so very excited but within a few weeks we learned that this little one was not meant to live with us.  As a very dear friend said to me "your mom needed to hold this baby more than you did" and it was that thought that held close as I struggled through the days and weeks of recovering.  We mourned together as a family and held close that we would try again soon to grow our family.

Fast forward a few days after life had started to return to normal and Daddy had a big surprise.  A job he had interviewed for last fall and then found out might not work out, suddenly just came back into the picture...and looked surprisingly promising.  So...after a week of much soul searching, he made the decision that the job (and the move) was the best course of action for our family.  It was not a decision made lightly, as there are many, many, many, many factors in play.  Professionally, it's change in role for Daddy, there were some nitty-gritty details that we had to weigh, and it's a move halfway across the country.  As far as our family, it means uprooting them from the only life they have known, changing schools, churches, our life!, starting over, find a new house - and living without Daddy for 3 months while the kids finish out the school year and Daddy starts his new position.  It was a lot - and still is!

But we decided we would embraced the adventure, Daddy accepted the job, we began telling key people, and then we took a Mystery Trip to reveal the big news to the kids...

We picked them up from school and started off sharing very little about our final destination with them :).  Mystery Trips were a tradition my mom started when I was little and we love to share with our kids...and it's always a fun surprise at the end.  Knowing we had a long trip ahead of us, we made plans to stop halfway the first night...and there was nothing really new and exciting about that part of the trip - we went through Connecticut, New York, and into Pennsylvania - a similar trip if we were heading to the grandparents.  There was, of course, a bit of car trouble and some weather to contend with...

The next morning, the mystery began to build as we traveled through some new-to-us states...

And by late afternoon we had arrived at our destination and were ready to make a big announcement to our little family...

These happy little faces were so excited to hear we are moving to Michigan! 

After 17 years in Rhode Island, owning and fixing up our first home, having 4 babies, both Daddy and I finishing graduate school, and making many friends and living through many joys and struggles - we are packing it all up and starting over in the mid-west...where they try to convince you that the lake is just like the ocean (and I will NEVER believe that...by far the biggest sadness of this move is to leave my closeness to the ocean and my love of the beach!)...where we know no one...where we will learn to live a slower paced life in a land where they get a bit more snow than we are used to...we we can't wait to adventure together as a family!!!

Stay tuned to see where life leads us...