Maya started preschool last week. In Ireland they call preschool Montessori, although not all preschools use the actual Montessori method. Maya’s school does, though, so it’s technically a Montessori Montessori. Ha! On her first day, we barely managed a few photos to commemorate the morning. Are we the only family who always runs out of time for photos on the important occasions? I wish we’d gotten photos with both Michael and I together with Maya. I also wish I’d gotten photos that weren’t blurry, but there’s always next year I suppose! Or the year after that… Her class is mixed with kids from 2.8 years old to 6, and there are 20 of them with 3 teachers. Her main teacher is Mexican, if you can believe it, and she greets each kid by saying ‘hola’ each morning. I couldn’t believe how perfect that was, a lovely smidge of our Houston life and Maya’s heritage every morning. When I pick her up, she says ‘hasta luego’ to her teachers and gabs about her morning all the way home. Since the first morning she’s been nothing but excited to stuff her ‘pack pack’ with as many toys as possible and trundle off to school. She comes home covered in paint and dirt from playing outside. So far, so very good.  It’s hard to believe she’s old enough for preschool, but she’s so ready and so happy.

We are so excited that we finally get to share some big news! We’re moving back to Dublin this summer! While we had envisioned that this wacky Houston adventure would be a one year “sabbatical,” we’re very good at overstaying our welcome (remember how I agreed to live in Dublin for a year and then it was almost 8 and we bought a house and are planning to raise our kids there?) and by the time we leave we will be just short of three years in Houston. Three years, two forever kids, four foster kids, a whole slew of new and dear friends, a few extra pounds (blaming the barbecue and sleep deprivation!) and wrinkles, and utterly priceless memories. Once we knew Noah was ours forever last summer, we knew this would be our last year in Houston. While it has been an incredible experience and so rewarding to be here, it’s also been exhausting. Not having family around while we have two young kids has been really hard, and we have definitely outgrown our little apartment by now. We knew that once we finalized a second adoption, we’d start making plans to head home. So on July 9th, we’ll get on a plane with a squirmy baby-toddler combo and make our way to Dublin!

The kids and I will actually leave Houston in mid-June and head to Maine for a few weeks. Michael will stay on for a little while to finalize getting rid of everything we own. Ha! Just a small project, eh? That will be followed by a few more weeks in Maine with my family, and then another fairly large project once we get to Dublin: fix up and furnish that house we bought as we moved to Houston enough to live in by the end of August! ***

I’ve been thinking so much about our initial move here as we prepare to leave. What a wild leap of faith we took! We had no idea what we were getting ourselves into, but we were so hopeful. It makes me teary to think about the months before we left Dublin and then the weeks of our Houston adventure before Maya arrived. We had so much hope and faith that this wild plan would work. And it did. It worked twice. It’s honestly hard for us to believe and we’re the ones living it! We have two incredible children, Michael (and I, sometimes) got to work at a school that is about as different from an Irish school as you could ever get, we were introduced to fostering, which broke our hearts in all the right ways, and our marriage grew so much stronger through the rollercoaster of this adventure. (Our kids are really receptive to direction when it comes to photo shoots in the heat and humidity!)

I’ve had to stop thinking about what it will be like to actually get on a plane and leave Houston because it makes me so emotional. We have so many priceless memories here, especially in our little bunker of an apartment. We brought both our babies through that door for the first time, they’ve crawled and walked and cried and laughed here, and we’ve all felt so safe in this tiny little space. Part of me is very glad that I don’t have to be part of the process of taking down their cribs or getting rid of the last of their toys before leaving. Good thing Michael is less sentimental about that sort of thing!

***

Last weekend, we had our children dedicated in our Vineyard Houston church, alongside a few other babies in the congregation. They asked us all to come stand up front with any family members who were with us. Of course, our family lives thousands of miles away, so we just expected to stand up there by ourselves, which was fine. I burst into tears of gratitude and surprise when half of my moms group came up to stand behind us and bless our children, standing in for our family. They are our family. People who didn’t know us at all three years ago threw us a baby shower, brought us meals when Noah arrived, loved our children and most importantly, took care of us like family.

But no matter how many tears I’ll probably cry between now and when we leave Houston, returning to Dublin with two children feels like getting to take a victory lap with two giant trophies. We are so grateful for what Houston has given us over the last three years, and what the city has meant to our family. We are looking forward to returning one day to walk our kids through the memories of their first years of life, and to hug our friends again.

***

These photos, taken by our dear and talented friend and Houston Heights neighbor Andrew Buckler, were inspired by the photos I shared almost 3 years ago when I finally revealed the reason we hadn’t returned to Dublin after a summer in the States. It was a fairly vulnerable thing to share that we were uprooting our lives to try to adopt when we didn’t know what would happen or whether our plan would work at all. But not 12 hours after I shared that post, with this little bistro table and chair set I DIY’d back to life, we got the call that our daughter was here.

The chairs are now surrounded by a growing menagerie of toddler toys and plastic vehicles. The fabric covering the chairs has faded, but they’ve been the place we’ve watched Maya and now Noah play outside (until the mosquitos arrive) for hours over the last few years. They’ve been our welcome home to this little bunker of an apartment building, reminding us of the outrageous hope we had when I literally held my breath and posted that blog post, half wondering if everyone would think we were nuts. And reminding us of what our bravery accomplished, what our giant leap into the unknown to find the baby and then babies we had been waiting for achieved.

Weirdly, that little bright green patio set symbolizes our big dream and our even bigger gratitude for this life we get to live because of the leap we took.

***

We are embarking on some exciting new projects upon our return to Dublin, including starting the licensing process to become foster parents over there, launching a copywriting company with a friend, and beginning to document our travels with our own kids around Ireland. Who knows, there might even be Delightful Dublin for Kids on the horizon!

I’ll be sharing all of those adventures here more regularly. I hope you’ll join me. xx

More photos from our little Houston life. 

I’ve been thinking lately about how to love where you live. It’s by far one of the skills I most appreciate having learned. For almost eight years, we lived in Dublin and I think often about how much I struggled to enjoy Dublin when I first moved there. That might even be an understatement. For the first full year, I think I cried more than I didn’t. I was so homesick as a brand new ex-pat, especially because I hadn’t really ever lived very far from my family or where I grew up.

But I actually remember the moment my attitude toward Dublin shifted. It was such an ah-ha moment that I wrote it on a piece of paper and I think it’s still saved with our belongings somewhere back in Dublin. I remember realizing that my unhappiness wasn’t something I wanted to tell our kids decades down the line. What a silly story that one day we’d tell our kids, “Well, we moved to Dublin but your mom hated it and cried all the time.” I realized we’d have to make the story we’d want to tell our kids and our grandkids one day.

That first year in Dublin wasn’t exactly anything to write home about. Skype was brand new, email was still pretty spotty, and texting internationally was expensive. We were so poor, Michael was in grad school and no one would hire me in the height of the recession. We actually ended up having to move out of our first apartment and in with Michael’s parents because we just couldn’t make it work. It felt like we had failed in our first year of marriage. And to add to it all, I couldn’t help but feel that Michael’s friends were hand-me-down friends to me. I hadn’t made new friends in so long and it was hard to do without having a job or any hobbies to do without him. It was all a bit dire!

But changing my attitude toward living there made an enormous difference and quickly. And what I learned in that first year was that despite the challenges, I got to make a choice to love where I lived, and that made me see the place in a new light. Heck, we ended up buying a house over there, so my attitude certainly changed! Eight years later, when we moved to Houston, we weren’t technically expats anymore, but we might as well have been. Michael and I both have American passports, but we’d only ever really lived in Maine. Michael spent a few months in Houston in college, but Houston was still a little shocking for us when we first arrived. And while we did have the exciting purpose of trying to adopt when we were settling in, I think consciously enjoying the place where we were was the key to settling in to Houston quickly and happily.

We aren’t staying in Houston forever (more on that soon!), but I’m pretty sure we could now that I’ve learned that priceless art of loving where you live. Half of it is deciding to love it, and the other half is finding people and places that make you feel like you’re home. We had a total of two friends and one family member in Houston that we knew when we arrived, and they all lived 45 minutes away. Since we are sort of fussy coffee people, we ended up going to the same coffee spot often in our neighborhood (with our Brother Hubbard KeepCups that are still going strong several years later!) and it wasn’t long before they knew us (well, Michael at least) by name.

So I suppose that’s my advice. Decide to love the place you’re in, explore it, and frequent places you love often. Strike up conversations, be friendly, ask for recommendations. Having someone know your face and your name goes such a long way in feeling like you belong somewhere. I was recently approached by the Allianz Care team, a health care company with Expat Health Insurance plans that include an Expat Assistance Program. Isn’t that an awesome idea? And get this, they offer a 24/7 multilingual support service that can help expats and their kids (presuming they’re a bit older than ours) deal with cross-cultural transitions, cultural shock, coping with loneliness, relationships and workplace challenges. I can tell you that having lived in America, where health care is a less holistic or preventative or mental health oriented than ever, I think this is an incredible offering from an international health plan, and if we were staying longer we’d fully take advantage of it.

From time to time, I get emails from people who are moving to Ireland and other places, and I’m always happy to chat about what that transition was like for us.

This post was written in partnership with Allianz. Thanks for supporting the posts that make this blog possible!