I had been gone for 26 days. A work trip that took me through Europe and Asia, and every single night Adam and I would get on a call and talk through the plan. How we would tell the kids. When. What we would say. It was weighing heavy on both of us. Our timeline was getting shorter and shorter and we knew it had to be done.

So Sunday night, we sat the kids down for a family meeting on the deck. And we were honest. Like, really honest.

“Kids, you know money has been tighter these last few months. We’ve been saying no more than we want to. We hate having to choose between doing this or that. We’ve been a one car family for over a year and there’s no way right now we can afford a car payment. We don’t use half our house. We spend every weekend mowing, fixing something, cleaning something… and it just isn’t what we want to be doing with our time together.”

So we told them. We are selling the house. We are selling most of our things and putting the rest in storage. And when we head to Europe… which they already knew was the plan… there will be no bills, no stuff, nothing pulling us back or weighing on our minds. When we return, we will all find our next house together.

Then came the questions. They were not what we expected.

“Can we stay in the same school district?” Of course.

“When we sell our stuff at the garage sale, can we keep the money from our own things?” Of course.

“How much can we keep?” Each of us is starting with four 27-gallon tubs. I mean… what else do we really need?

And that was it. No tears. No meltdowns. Nothing. They were fine, happy, even. Within days they had already started filling their tubs and moving things to the garage for the sale.

Adam and I looked at each other and just exhaled. The weight we had been carrying was gone just like that.

Here’s the thing, our kids are no strangers to adventure and change. We lived on a school bus during COVID. We go away most summers. These kids have been across the world and back. Change is not scary to them, it is just the next thing.

We know we haven’t blogged in a while, and trust us, there is a lot of adventure that happened in between that we cannot wait to share. But right now we are focused on this next chapter.

One last thing — we do not know how long this adventure will last. The kids know we are leaving for the summer. We do not know when we will be back. It could be two months. It could be a year. We are going to go, live, experience and see how we feel as we go. No rigid plan. No end date. Just us.

T-minus 59 days. 🌍

Q: How did you prepare your kids for such a big life change? A: Honestly we just told them the truth. We talked about money, about time, about what we wanted our life to look like. Kids handle honesty better than we give them credit for.

Q: What are you doing with all your belongings? A: Garage sale, donations and storage. Each family member gets four 27-gallon tubs of things to keep. That’s it — and it feels incredibly freeing.

Q: What about school while you travel? A: We are world schooling — a mix of online learning, real world experiences, museums, language immersion and culture. And when we return, the kids will go back to their school district and their friends.

Q: How long will you be gone? A: We genuinely don’t know! Minimum the summer, but it could stretch to a year or more. We are following our gut and seeing how it feels as we go.

Q: Are you scared? A: Ask us again in 59 days. 😄

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Want to see how our family adventure turned out? Read our complete Norway guide for everything we learned. And if you are thinking about your own leap, visit our Plan Your Trip page.

Looking for more? Check out our destination guides from Adventures We Seek.