Daily Prompt: What giant step did you take where you hoped your leg wouldn’t break? Was it worth it, were you successful in walking on the moon, or did your leg break?

When my husband was offered a job in the Foreign Service, everything happened so quickly that I had barely time to think about the size of the leap we were taking.  In a few short months he went from “conditional offer” to an actual placement, and I had a further span of about twelve weeks to sell the house, pack everything, move our son out of school, close down my business and figure out what I needed to know once we arrived at the other end….which was the Philippines by the way…and may have been the moon for all I knew about it.   The days were filled from 6am to 11pm with multiple check lists, developing problems, twists and turns.. feeding the cat and making dinner.  In the middle of it all, my son broke his elbow, and I sat until evening in the hospital’s recovery room,taking calls from our realtor, my husband in Washington and the health insurance people, until I fell asleep in my coat and boots, waiting for the doctor to release him.  Sometimes I felt excited, curious or anxious about our new future, but mostly I just lived in the moments created by our big exit plan and trying to make it all work in time.

Somehow it all came together.  Our house sold…despite having the worst possible buyers.  Our stuff got packed out…despite a massive Nor’Easter.  And, that night I walked out of our NJ home for the last time.  We arrived in DC just our few suitcases despite Amtrak’s enormous power failure, where we sat stranded for most of the night on the track somewhere outside of Baltimore.   And somehow we made it out to The Philippines, where we made it our life for two and half years.

Now we live  in Nepal on our second assignment,  having repeated the madness of exit and entry all over again, and we are now working at making another alien new world feel normal.  There are days when I wonder if its worth it, when friends and family feel far away and I can’t stand the dust, dirt and noise of Kathmandu for a minute longer.  But most of the time I’m profoundly grateful for the amazing opportunities that this crazy life brings and keeping my blog has become a way to focus on the spectacular opportunities of our life here.  It would be faithless not to.