Peter is on his first out-of-country-trip since our move. (Also his first work trip since almost 1.5 years. I am so spoiled!) A good time to finally finish this post I started writing two weeks ago.

Thinking of Austin, I realize more and more, it’s not home anymore. Looking around in our living room, I realize this is not home either. Waiting for our new house, which hopefully will become our home soon, it aches sometimes. Aching for home.
As a friend of mine pointed out, that longing for home -which we all recognize by times- is a sweet (but sometimes hard) reminder that we are made to long for home. To be home. In heaven. And however beautiful and loving our home here will be, it’s only a fraction of the beauty and love we will experience in our eternal home.

Though we are in between two of those earthly homes, and life daily feels “in between”, we have taken some serious steps.

We started with arriving safely in the Netherlands almost two months (!!) ago. We moved in a temporarily house, made sure we are all legal here and did experience winter. (They call it Spring here with 52F, can you imagine!)

We got a car and two valid driver licences! I’m working on getting bikes for the whole family. We found a school so the kids have something to bike to (or maybe for other reasons…). Boaz and Zarah will start on Monday March 6. Even Sophie gets to go to the same school for two mornings in the week.

We’re using the time we are not bound to school schedule for going to museums, meeting with family, sleeping in, playing Lego’s and getting used to weather, land and language. And eating way too much hagelslag (sprinkles you put on bread).

Also we got the whole trash thing down. That might sound minor. But nope.
We have, let me count, five different waste piles.
1: glass -which partially is going back to store for refundable deposit and partially needs to be trashed in special glass trash at end of neighborhood
2: paper
3: compost
4: plastic, tin
5: rest
#2-5 are all collected at the house at different days, every two weeks.

Another not necessarily minor step: we bought a house. On March 28 we hope to get the keys.

We still have about 10,000 paperwork things to go (insurance, tax, bank, etc) which are all  just slightly more complicated since there is no Dutch employer involved).

Besides that there are still enough things on the to-do-list. Like eating snacks from the snackbar (which of course we did, but there is always room for more), go to the heathlands (can always more often), bike in national park Hoge Veluwe, spending more time with family and friends, meet new friends, have dance parties and sleep for 24h straight.

But er, who cares about our to-do-list.
You know what is way more intriguing?!
This mind-blowing, cuddly, smiley little dude we have in our family. He wrote his own to-do-list!
But not just that… Within 6 weeks after moving from his birth-land, overseas, to his parents-land he managed to check the whole list!

Check it out:

(learn to crawl, learn to pull myself up to stand, eat normal food -im so done with just milk-, ask for more food, make my family laugh by talking way too much at dinner time, keep being that awesome friendly happy easy going boy)

You don’t believe me?
I’ll prove it! Here some digital evidence.

By now the end of my to-do-list for today is almost there.
Just a few things to go:

• pour myself some wine
• put my feet up
• relax
• go to bed

Time to start working on those.

What’s on your list?