Recalculating...

Our house, where I thought I'd be spending my summer.

At least that's what my GPS says to me when we all thought we were heading in one direction, but then I suddenly throw everything off by heading down a different path than the planned route. And that's kind of what is happening to our summer.

When we got back from our trip to Florida and Disneyworld on May 1st, I thought that was sort of it as far as traveling went this summer. We'd had our big fun trip, and had nothing else on the cards beyond maybe a long weekend with Nick's parents as far as the eye could see. The rest of the summer would be spent at home, playing with friends, doing a few day trips here and there and mostly trying to beat the heat.

But then there was the question of our anniversary. We will have been married for 10 years in August, and always planned to do something big to celebrate. Although that was going to be tricky/nigh on impossible with two small kids, unless we took them with us, which wasn't really what we had in mind. At this point some friends and family kindly offered to take the kids so we could maybe swing a long weekend in San Francisco, and we thought that was going to be it. While it wasn't quite the Grand Adventure we'd always envisioned for this milestone, we love San Francisco and were definitely happy to spend a few days there.

Then Nick's parents, angels that they are, offered to take the kids for a week. A week! Suddenly the world was quite literally our proverbial oyster, and we started thinking what might be really fun. We knew we wanted to stay within North America so we wouldn't spend half our time traveling and adjusting to time changes, and we knew we wanted to go somewhere neither of us had been before.

We're going here! On this ship!

And now we have booked a cruise to Alaska in August!

Neither of us have been on a cruise before, and neither of us have been to Alaska before, so we are very excited to check it all out. We did our research and booked all of our shore excursions, and were more or less just enjoying the rest of the summer at home until...

We're going to see my mum!

My mum needed to have hip replacement surgery. We knew it was coming, but it wasn't until two days before her surgery that I fully realized how tricky recovery is going to be for her. She will be on crutches and won't be able to drive for six weeks, and was sort of wondering how she was going to manage. Long story short, she had her surgery on Wednesday, should be headed home on Sunday, and the kids and I are flying out to Norway on Monday.

I am freaking out just a little bit. We booked our tickets just a week before leaving, which is the shortest amount of time I've ever had between deciding to go on a big trip like this and actually leaving. And I'll be flying with the kids by myself for the first time ever, which is pretty daunting. I'm actually not dreading the actual flights as much as the travel surrounding them (when I think about getting myself, two kids and our luggage onto the train at the airport in Oslo, I kind of want to cry just a little bit). But I know we can do it, and that things are rarely as bad as I imagine them to be. It'll be a hard day getting there, but it's only one day, and when we're done, we're done.

The hardest part by far is going to be leaving Nick for a month, because I am crazy in love with him. And he's helpful and lovely and we share a brain. And the kids love him and he is the other pair of hands that takes over when I'm doing something else. And we haven't been apart for more than about five days at a time in the 10 years we've been married. Oh, I'm going to miss him like cray-cray. (See?)

But! I get to spend time with my mum and my brother, I'll be able to see some of my favorite friends (and I'm really hoping my 94 year-old Nana!), I'll be in Norway, I'll get to speak Norwegian and hear Norwegian and read Norwegian and be Norwegian for a whole month! And I get to eat Norwegian food! Ohhh, it's like finding a gas station in the middle of nowhere when you weren't sure you were going to make it to the next town. So unexpected and just what I needed! And most importunely, I will be able to actually be useful and helpful to my mother which, given the geographical distance between us, doesn't happen very often. I feel very lucky that we were able to make it work.

So, goodness knows when I'll be able to blog again. I'll be keeping up with the small health changes I've made, but not adding anything new until we get back (although I am hoping I can do a good amount of walking while I'm in Norway and it's not 97 degrees outside). I'll be Instagramming up a storm while I'm gone (I even convinced Nick to get an account!), so if you're interested, you can find me there. My username is Tamsin_North.

I'll be back in a month, if not before, at which point I will surely start blogging about frugal living and austerity measures after I have spent all our money traveling the Northern hemisphere.

Bye for now!



Image borrowed here.