The Dead Samaritan: A Dublin Thriller

September 18, 2018

So in addition to moving back to Dublin this summer, I’ve had a little more excitement in the last few months. Late last month, my book was published! It was so long in the making, and then even longer in the publishing, but The Dead Samaritan  arrived yesterday in the mail and it finally feels real. So now begins the process of letting the world know it exists!

It’s very surreal seeing my name on Amazon. I even have an author page! Julie (my Delightful Dublin partner) took the photo for me and I tried to look as serious as possible. Delightful Dublin and The Dead Samaritan are sort of polar opposites on the genre range, so my author photo needed a different sort of feel. It’s available on Kindle and in paperback, and I really hope that if you buy it, you enjoy it, and if you enjoy it, you’ll leave a kind review on Amazon. Apparently that’s the key to crime novel success these days! Fingers crossed!

Maya Starts Preschool

September 17, 2018

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.

Noah Turns One

September 14, 2018

We now have a one year old little boy! Well, technically, we have a 13 month old by this point, but we did celebrate on his actual birthday with cupcakes and family, and it only took me a month to get the photos off my camera and onto my computer to share.  Let me tell you a cautionary tale about sparkler candles. Don’t use them with one-year-olds. All was well until we lit that candle and then both Noah and Maya were very nervous about the smell and the flashing. Luckily, the sugar helped them change their tunes. Noah was so concerned. Ha!  He was happier to eat the frosting while in my arms, with my shirt to wipe his fingers. I think it even ended up in my hair.  Maya licked the frosting off at least 3 cupcakes and couldn’t figure out why her cousin spent the whole time asleep on the couch. They came straight from a flight from the States to celebrate with us!  We can’t believe how lucky we are to have Noah in our family. I wish I had photos of him smiling from his birthday, because it truly lights up his whole face. He’s silly and cuddly and loves nothing more than being permanently attached to me or Michael at all times. If he could never be set down, he’d be perfectly happy. He babbles to himself in the car and when he’s playing, and when he’s putting himself down for a nap he has long conversations with himself. He’s a dream come true and we’re so grateful to be smeared in frosting or avocado or oatmeal by him every day!

Transitioning Home

September 10, 2018

I’ve started this post at least five different times in the last few weeks. And each time, before I get a chance to finish it, it’s all out of date and I scrap the whole thing. We’ve been back in Dublin for almost two months and are now settled into our new home. Michael started a new dream job, Maya started preschool last week, and Noah now has a wonderful nanny who comes to watch him three mornings a week so that I can work. Finally, we are getting back to a reality I can survive, because the last few months have been the hardest parenting/living I can remember doing.

A move, in isolation, probably wouldn’t have been quite so taxing. But a move that included a month with one set of grandparents, then another month in the other grandparents’ house without the actual grandparents definitely added to the transition. The first month involved two weeks in Maine with my parents but without Michael – and Noah basically wouldn’t leave my hip. I don’t think I went to the bathroom by myself for two weeks. And then the second month involved staying in Michael’s parents’ house (and trying to keep Maya from getting into her grandma’s craft supply every nap time) while gutting our new house. I watched kids and Michael helped with the work on the house, and in between we tried to make very fast decisions about what actually we wanted in the house. When we finally wrangled both kids into bed at night, I’d write until midnight. Needless to say, 6 hours of sleep or less a night for that long left me feeling fairly depleted. Maya, bless her heart, has turned into a tricky sleeper as a toddler and the stress of the move coupled with sleeping in a new spot and changing time zones led to night terrors that we’re only now recovering from. When she sleeps through the night, we’re still surprised and relieved. Noah, meanwhile, sleeps like a champ for 11 hours each night, but still isn’t willing to go into anyone else’s arms without a fuss. It’s a function of his personality (the first thing he did when I met him at 18 hours old was cling to my finger and not let go) and not having anyone around for the first 10 months of his life.

All that to say, we’re not going to sign up for any more international moves with babies and toddlers anytime soon! We are thrilled with our house, and I can’t wait to properly share it with you. Every morning we say we can’t believe how lucky we were that we bought when we did (in 2015, before we moved to Houston) and every evening we say we can’t believe this is our life. When we left Houston, all we were focused on was getting to Ireland. We didn’t think much beyond stepping off the plane and beginning the next phase of our lives together as a family. Welp, that was silly. Not unusual for me, because I don’t always think ahead in these big change situations, but silly. We should have thought about and prepared ourselves for how big a transition it was going to be for all of us. The kids rocked the jet lag so well in just a few days, but that was the easy part. New routines and places and nothing being familiar has been tricky. Not having our friends and our bagel place and our parks has been hard for Maya and for me. She asks about her Houston home still, and she doesn’t quite understand why all the houses look the same! I miss my friends, and the light, and regularly driving by places where the biggest events of our lives happened.

But we’re getting there, and in a few months hopefully all will feel a bit more peaceful. We’re going to paint our front door a pinky-peach colour so Maya knows which house is ours among a sea of same-looking buildings. We’ve found a new morning routine that often involves “baby-baccinos” from our new favorite coffee shop in Howth, and we’re working hard to make sure we talk about Houston and our life there and remember the amazing memories we can still enjoy from afar.

There are first birthday photos and first day of preschool photos and a whole lot of beach adventuring photos I’m excited to share next week. Thanks for bearing with us in this wild adventure, and for coming back to read after yet another long break.

Greetings from Dublin!

July 13, 2018

We’re home. When we finally landed after our more than 12 hour journey back to Dublin from my parents’ house in Maine, we looked at each other and said, “We’re home.” We did it. The crazy plan worked, we had two beautiful children sleeping in our arms as we walked to baggage claim, and despite being utterly exhausted from the flight, moving out of our Houston home, shlepping suitcases across an ocean, jet lag. We’re home and we did it.

We’ve hit the ground running and started straight in on our new house (the one we bought before we left but that has been rented out for the last 3 years) and it’s currently in a total state of renovation. We are hoping to be in it by the end of July, and you’re welcome to stay updated with that crazy process via my Instagram stories (@emilyholmes).

We took the kids to our favorite beach tonight and Maya couldn’t peel the smile off her face. Even though we’re staying at my in-laws’ house, the kids have already settled more than they have been in months. It’s as though everyone knows this is finally home.  Not to be outdone in the gleeful smile category, our almost-one-year-old is pretty darn thrilled too.  This kid stood on his own for the first time tonight. We almost have another walker!  We are happy to be home. We can’t wait to (hopefully more reliably) share the next part of our journey with you. xx

Big News // We’re Moving Back to Ireland!

May 24, 2018

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. 

How To Love Where You Live

May 21, 2018

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! 

It Took A Village

May 10, 2018

I started writing this post back when Noah was this tiny – 9 months ago now! And now I can hardly believe he was ever this tiny! But once the shock of having a new little one in our house had worn off a little, I was (and still am, and still probably will be) overwhelmed with gratitude at how many people have helped make our family.

Any time a new life makes its way into the world, it takes more people than just its parents to make that happen. Noah’s case might have been just a little more extreme on the needing-help level than most, but I’m reminded so often that so many people helped make Noah’s arrival possible. Now that he’s been in our lives for more than nine months, it’s well past time to acknowledge just how much of a village it took to get him into this family.

I’ve written before about the sheer amount of paperwork needed to complete our adoption license (which, by the way, we did all over again with our new agency three months before Noah arrived), but I don’t think I’ve ever talked about how many people helped make our application possible, and I want to thank them because really, we wouldn’t be a family of four without them all. First, our friends and family who stood by us and behind us as we figured out if changing agencies was the right decision, which wasn’t easy or simple or fast. Then another handful of our close friends and family who filled out extensive reference letters for our application.

When it came time for Noah’s arrival, another whole slew of people made it possible for us all to get to him.

Michael took wonderful care of Maya while I sped back to Houston to meet Noah when he was born, but he had a ton of help from his parents, his brothers and their wives, and literally everyone else who passed through the house. I’d get photos from him of Maya having a great time with his cousins or friends of his family’s and it was so reassuring as I was sitting in the hospital worrying about the baby in my arms and the baby across the ocean.

Michael’s sister and her new husband made it possible for me to get on a flight four days after we got the news that Noah was arriving two weeks early, which took the tremendous financial pressure of that journey off of us.

When Michael headed back to the States with Maya, he had almost a 24-hour layover in Boston (because of the way we originally booked our flights a few months earlier). Last minute, he asked a friend from college if he and Maya could stay with them and she and her family were so welcoming to him. Honestly, knowing that they were being so well taken care of between such a difficult journey back to me and Noah was exactly what I needed in order to just focus on our new little dude.

Because we’d rented our apartment for the two months we were gone, I didn’t have our apartment to come back to for the first few days I was in Houston. A dear friend’s mom let me stay with her, and her house turned out to be just steps away from the medical center where Noah was born. And during that period of anticipation, being in a home with a mom instead of on my own in a hotel was exactly what I needed. Then my dear friend, Jamie, whose mom I was staying with drove in from Dallas to be with me until Noah was born. On the day Noah was born, she went out of her way to keep me distracted and encouraged as we waited (and waited) for news of his arrival. The day after Jamie had to go back to Dallas, my sister flew in from Maine to be with me for the weekend. It was perfect timing, and she not only helped me get organized and settled with Noah, she also stocked my freezer with meals that lasted us weeks. When those ran out, my mom’s group started a meal train and brought yummy meals that lasted us through the hurricane and subsequent flood.

In addition to the paperwork and waiting, adoption also involves cost. When Maya was born and totally surprised us, our entire community, on and off line chipped in to make her adoption fee happen in less than two weeks. This time around, we were a little more prepared and had saved part of it ourselves. But we didn’t have it all, and there are a few people who made it happen and we are so grateful. I wish cost wasn’t a common barrier to adoption, but it very much is and we are so grateful that we had the support network to get things in order twice, for the two biggest, most priceless gifts we could ever have imagined.

All that to say, we are so grateful to all the people in our lives who helped make our family of four happen. No matter how sleep deprived we are, we are always, always grateful that we have two little people making us sleep deprived!

Exploring Texas / Spring Bluebonnets and Fire Ants

April 17, 2018

Let me tell you a funny story about a family of non-Texans trying to take photos with the Texas state flower in a field with 100 other people.  Our kids were characteristically not up for the photo opportunity, but I’m getting used to that. Ha! But our friends Amy and Jensen were very patient and snapped a whole bunch of our foursome and we managed to find quite a few serendipitously cute.  This photo shows just how many other people were actually out in that field in Brenham with us. It was sort of painful and sort of hilarious, but my desire to take photos of my tiny Texans with the state flower won out. Sorry, Michael!  And this is where the story takes a turn, because this is the exact moment Maya stepped in a giant fire ant hill. Womp womp. That basically cut our photo shoot and our afternoon short. She ended up with only about five bites on one ankle (which characteristically swelled up more than any ant bite I’ve ever seen), but we’re so lucky I figured out what was going on quickly and managed to get most of the ants out of her leggings before they did more damage. The field did have a sign that warned of rattlesnakes, but they should have had a sign for us foreigners about the fire ants! I always forget about them. Poor Maya!  Thereafter, Maya was shoes-off on Michael’s shoulders, far away from potential ant enemies for the rest of the excursion.  I’m obsessed with Noah in his tiny jeans and shoes. He’s such a handsome little dude! He also never stops moving and twisting and wiggling. My kids have no chill mode! But they do now have photos with bluebonnets, whether that will ever matter or not!

If you’re looking for bluebonnets in the springtime in the Houston area, Brenham and Chappell Hill are about an hour northwest of the city. Just remember to wear socks!

America Made Us Activists

April 10, 2018

Despite the fact that I spent 2 years in college and almost two years after college working for political campaigns, I can’t say that I had been particularly politically active since then. Other than voting and sharing articles online and talking a lot about the state of the world, I hadn’t done much to actually show any sort of activism until we moved to Houston. Until we moved back to the United States.

Of course, America over the last year and a bit has changed a lot of people in that department. Since the 2016 election, I’ve participated in two marches and a walk. The walk wasn’t exactly activism, but it was leaving the house and showing up for a cause that’s important to our family.

In early 2017, I brought Maya to the Women’s March in Houston, and it was really therapeutic after the pain of the presidential election. There were so many people and so many clever, smart signs. We should have made a sign, but we’re getting better with experience!

In February this year, our whole family attended the Houston AIDS March downtown, and we were a little better prepared with red balloons to tie to the kids’ stroller. (Total side note, can I tell you how much we love that stroller? I get so many comments on how sneaky the second seat is down by my feet. I recommend it to everyone!) In the past, I would have thought about going to a walk like the AIDS walk, but probably wouldn’t have made the final effort. Now, when we can possibly make our schedules work (let’s be honest, naps are crucial to the success of any day with two little kids), we make the effort. We get the balloons and we show up and we ensure our voices are heard. We also ensure our kids know that very small sacrifices of our time are the least we do as a family to support people we love.

Most people don’t know that one of our kids’ birth moms is HIV positive, and that was most likely a factor in her choosing to make an adoption plan. Neither of our kids is HIV positive, as passing the virus from mother to baby is very rare and can be avoided with C-sections and antiretrovirals, but it’s something that we feel strongly about supporting — both researching a cure and taking down the stigma of what has become a really manageable disease. We’re also passionate about supporting a woman who didn’t have to choose life for her child, but did anyway. She took the medicine she needed to and attended every appointment she was assigned, all so that her child would have the utmost chance at normal, healthy life. We are forever indebted, and so we showed up for her as well.

A few weeks ago, we showed up again. This time for the March for Our Lives to advocate for gun control. The Houston Heights march started about one block from our house, so we whipped up a sign on an old piece of cardboard and walked up and down Heights Boulevard. Part of me realizes that it might be a little inappropriate for a 2-year-old to carry a sign that says “We call BS,” but the larger part of me hopes both my kids grow up to be as outspoken, thoughtful, passionate and articulate as Emma Gonzalez, from whom that quote originated. I never, ever, want my kids to experience even an active shooter drill let alone an active shooter. It is total BS. And I hope our kids know that’s the least of the strong language we have for the causes we believe in. America has made us activists, and while that’s in large part because there’s a heck of a lot going wrong from the top down right now, it’s a silver lining I’m grateful for.