confetti rainfall in the quiet street

So we're moving to England. In case you didn't already know.

We're going to have to master the conversion from dollars to pounds. 

Berlin's going to have a British accent. 

And we're not going to have peanut butter. Yeah, we have peanut butter. It's okay.

Sometime last summer, Jeremy started thinking seriously about starting his goal to get an MBA. It's been in the back of his mind since before he graduated from BYU (so, before April 2009), and he knew then that he would need an MBA to improve and further his career within a few years after graduation. When he graduated, he wasn't really sure when he'd apply for an MBA program because he knew he would need work experience, and right when he graduated, his first and immediate goal was to win a world championship in London the following summer. He trained, he and his teammates took home gold medals, and they continued working hard and landed a spot on America's Got Talent the next summer. It was the next summer, three years after he'd graduated, that he landed an accidental career-forming job that was created for him more or less during an interview for an entirely different position, and he's been there for the last three years. Last fall, Jeremy was ready for a career change, so he started job hunting and more seriously considering the potentially perfect timing of applying to an MBA program. But we sat on the idea for a long time. It wasn't til November that we attended a single info session at BYU (which meant we'd already missed at least one of the three rounds of deadlines to apply to any MBA program), but Jeremy was confident he should apply. We prayed about it, and he started studying for the GMAT during Christmas break (it's a long drive from Utah to Texas). He took the GMAT in March, and, well after the second round of applications for most schools and the third round for many more, started sending out applications before April.

So for the ideal MBA applicant, we started WAY late in the game. We knew that before Jeremy even started studying for the GMAT, but we both felt like he needed to be in school in the fall of 2015; this meant we had to be willing to take fewer options of programs who still had openings. A particularly bad practice test two days before the real GMAT had us feeling like we would have to be willing to accept even fewer offers, and we were a little discouraged, especially Jeremy, about how making the decision to apply to MBA programs so late was so seriously affecting us. Fortunately, on the day of the real GMAT, prayers and fasts and Jeremy's studying proved incredibly effective, and his score opened up the possibility to apply to schools he didn't dare dream about before test day. Jeremy worked hard and, with a little bit of scrambling, got in as many applications as he could before deadlines.

And the rejection letters came. It's hard to be brought back to reality after a miracle. His GMAT score brought him comfortably into the average acceptance range of schools like Harvard and Stanford and Cambridge, but of course, scores aren't everything. So when he got his first rejection letter, he was confident that we'd gotten a little carried away in our exuberance for his score and that he would still be lucky to get into even a couple of the schools to which he'd applied.

But shortly after his first rejection letter, he got his first interview. Followed by another rejection letter, followed by another interview. It was crazy how quickly our self-deemed delusion turned into a surprising reality. He'd been accepted to BYU, had an interview scheduled at the University of Cambridge, and on the way to the airport to fly to England, he found out that he'd been accepted to the University of Oxford.

Even now, after everything's settled, it's still crazy to think about.

After prayer and fasting and final rejection letters, we decided on Oxford. In short, this means we're selling almost everything we own and moving overseas with a few suitcases and a toddler. The last few weeks have been a ton of packing, late nights, moments of feeling overwhelmed, uploading pictures to sell all of our junk, and lots and lots of breaks.

This is a picture of literally everything in our kitchen when we first started selling stuff.

We must've learned a thing or two about selling because we no longer have any furniture.

But as for this kitchen stuff? ...we still have most of it.

Jeremy took this picture at like 11PM, which is actually pretty early for me to already be in my pajamas.

That was back when I made lists for what I needed to get done each day. And went to bed at a normal hour.

Both practices are long gone.

This picture is well after 11PM and is much more representative of just about every night.

It's after 11, we're both still wide awake and working on whatever project until one of us drops.

Probably not the healthiest practice.

 Berlin does a good job of keeping us grounded. He's always ready for a playtime break.

So, in case you didn't get that clear image, it has only gotten crazier since then. But it's a good crazy. Sure, there are a lot of unknowns, and sometimes a few more unknowns than we're comfortable with, but it wouldn't be an adventure if we weren't anxious going into it. It's going to be a lot of fun, and a lot of hard work, but when did hard work ever kill anyone?

...don't answer that.






[title from chase this light by jimmy eat world]