Where did the time go? The travel certainly has kept us busy over the last year, and we became experts at packing/unpacking. After the last post on the blog, we spent two months in Mauritius, followed by another two months in the US, attending three family weddings. It was great to be able to prioritize these weddings now, contrasting to all the events we missed in our busy work life. I loved sharing these milestone moments with the ones we loved, creating precious memories to be treasured . The US trip was also a great tour from the West to the East Coast seeing our closest friends - trips with Annie to the Roaring Camp, attending Susie's little Tim's baptism and becoming a Godmother, seeing Mike L, Bert, and YP settling in his new Bay Area life; the great reunion with Nancy and Ore at the Lake House where the dreams were spelled out three years ago; spending time with Glenn, Dionne, Stef in NYC/New England. Jack-Jack celebrated his third birthday at aunty Mina's in Boston, enjoyed a great culinary delight and his first Halloween pumpkin carving experience. He also had duties being the ring bearer, twice, at uncle Donovan and uncle Eric's weddings, looking so smart and grown up.
Afterwards, we embarked on our three month house hunting trip in Nelson, NZ.
It was quite a roller coaster ride. We arrived in early December, and were offered the Kiwi hospitality of staying with a friend we met at Rabbit Island from our last trip in their tranquil house in the Wairoa Gorge. It was good to have a base for our house hunt but that turned into quite a stress point for us later on. I suppose we were on such a mission to find a place we house-hunted with a lot of intensity -- we saw just about everything there is in the market, which is a lot -- and it was very exhausting to do this while lugging two kids in tow, in and out of the car, open-home after open-home. By the end of the process we practically could count all the streets in Richmond, the town we were looking to find a house in the Nelson region, and have a stack of notes on all the valuations of the various houses, neighborhoods, size/date of construction, approaching it with our investment banking training background. It was a such a first world problem that I feel I had no right to complain (it sounded so ridiculous to complain not finding a house with the ideal view, layout, construction, when it is not money we were lacking to buy a house) - yet it still brought about challenging moments for us feeling mentally exhausted by the lack of prospect of returning to a base that we can set up our home.
The friends we stayed with did not have children, so an infant and a toddler doing what kids that age do was quite disruptive to the way they live. They were very nice and didn't say a word of complaint, but we were quite self-conscious about it and felt the need to keep the kids away so the four of us practically lived in a way that we were out soon after the kids finish breakfast and only returned at night to shower and sleep, spending the whole day outside, every day, for three months. We soon became very familiar with the library (by the way, they allow you to take out 35 books per card -- imagine what a little library you can have at home! and we certainly went through our fair share of reading in the three months), and all the shady parking spots where the kids can take a nap during the day. The particularly challenging part for me was eating out all the time, without being able to make my own food. In hindsight we should have planned for an alternative short term accommodation but by the time we wanted to find another place everything was booked up for the busy summer holiday period, even motels only had short openings and no BnB/rental could accommodate our stay. We came to really value the need to have our own space, and making that mission of finding our own place just a little more desperate as well.
During the three months we also took a few breaks by taking some road trips - one week to the West Coast just after Xmas, two weeks in Wellington visiting mic's cousin in early January, who will be our closest relative in NZ, and another two weeks to Christchurch in Feb. These trips were welcome breaks to our cluttered and confused minds over finding our ideal home and also reinforces the reason we chose to move here -- the easy access to amazing scenery, beautiful walks, and incredibly child friendly.
Overall it was a good time. The weather was pleasant, the pace was slow, life was simple and pleasures were simple. Sweet tasting summer berries straight off the bush, Jack running with his dump truck on a stretch of beach that is miles long with nobody else on it, amazing sunsets, ever changing skies and clouds, picnics under the tree, aroma from freshly brewed delicious flat-whites, crisp tasting water from the well, and the list goes on.
Despite what a wonderful place we were in, I still got home-sick, at times, and that little cloud of doubt casted over our seemingly crazy decision to move away from everything we were familiar with. It didn't help that Veronique and I celebrated our birthdays away from close family and friends. I thought life would be enough, just the four of us, but I actually felt very sad that Veronique's first birthday was such a non-event. I was never into big parties so it wasn't that I wished for a fancy celebration and lots of people showing up, like what Jack had for his first birthday, but it just felt very lonely, that it was just us, with no one else that really cared for her by her side, seeing her at this milestone, taking her first steps, speaking her first words, and growing into her own little person day by day.
Jack-Jack was such a trooper, as always, an incredibly good traveler, and as accommodating as a three year old can be for our house hunting schedules. We sent him to a few pre-schools trials and to my surprise he adjusted so well to it like he belonged there on day one. I was worried with our nomadic lives he wasn't going to be ready to be away from us right away and I thought I had to gradually withdraw from the classroom, but he just happily waved goodbye the first time he stepped foot in the school and it was me who teared up from seeing how big my little boy has all of a sudden become. We signed him up so he has a spot at the Ark Preschool when we return, a welcome stability for him and for us.
The solution to our future address finally appeared the last week before we left. It was actually one of the first houses we saw in the first week we arrived but was ruled out as mic and I had different opinions over it. Subsequently the seller realized he didn't have a code of compliance certificate for the house so it was taken off the market while he sorts it out with the local council, and only came back on the market during our last week. Upon seeing it for the second time, we fell in love with it (well, I hate to say, but I always liked it from the start), and decided to make an offer on it.
Perhaps it was fate. Like a lot of things in life, you need to go through a certain journey, and what seemed like a full circle process was just the unavoidable learning you need to go through to discover what you really want, even though it may have been right in front of your eyes from the start. Regardless, I am happy that the hunt is over, and we didn't make the offer out of desperation, and this is a house that we can and will make a life in for this next phase of our lives.
377 Hill Street.
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