something just like this

I realize we're coming up on a year since the last time I put together some thoughts, or even a summary wishing it were a play-by-play, on anything we're doing. It's been an incredibly crazy year. Grab some popcorn.

Our main goal in going to Oxford (beside the immediate and more obvious acquirement of an MBA) was to stay in Europe. Before Jeremy even applied to any MBA program, we were planning on searching for a European job and doing everything we could to stay overseas for a few more years. We don't actually have a timeframe, we think we'll probably move back when the excitement of a new continent doesn't outweigh missing family, but that hasn't happened yet. Especially because we keep getting family to come and visit us :)

The Oslo adventure pushed our timeline back by several months - originally we thought we'd be into a new job and home before Oslo was born. But that didn't happen like we thought. And jobs and interviews didn't happen like we thought. So, with the deadline of needing to be out of our apartment and the UK looming, we just started planning Germany. We started looking at long-term AirBnBs, and Jeremy started applying for a few jobs in Berlin (a major tech-startup hub). Oslo had surgery at the end of February, and then March was spent packing and cleaning and getting rid of things. And then very suddenly we were on our way to the bus station, and then the airport, and then our first AirBNB.

At the Gatwick (UK) airport

We technically moved to Germany on March 30th, but we found a storage unit, stayed for a week, packed only a small-ish suitcase, and then didn't return to Berlin for another month. We went to the Czech Republic for a couple of days, Frankfurt for a week of Ostercamp,  Denmark for a week, and then Belgium and France for alternating days for various activities until we flew back to Berlin. We moved into a new Airbnb, a little more roomy than our first and with the checkout date for the same day that our tourist visas expired. Apparently, we run on deadlines.

Hiking in Czechia

Park in Russelsheim, pre-Ostercamp

Oslo with Kimbee, Ostercamp

Ostercamp

Beach in Denmark

Beach in Denmark

I don't even remember where this is. But man, we loved on this double stroller.

Grocery shopping in Denmark

Sightseeing in Gent, Belgium, before DDCB

Paris, France Temple Open House

Walking to the train station from Church with Trace and Meg Teerlink, back in Berlin

Kiersten and Kalie came to Berlin! June 2017

Topography des Terrors, Berlin

Hosting all of the jumpers who came for Turnfest 2017!

Freiburg, Germany temple

Visiting the Baganz family and seeing the progress of their koi pond, up close and personal 

(read: Berlin threw a rock in and had to get it out. Not sad about this punishment) 

Zepernick, Germany

Jeremy found a job and started working about a month after we came back to Berlin. It was a crazy month, but it was relieving. It meant we could get visas, which we didn't actually get until the end of August (Jeremy started work in June), but we did all of it legally- there's a weird not-loophole-but-feels-like-a-loophole that the German government created which allows for people without visas to stay until they can get a visa. Appointments at the Ausländerbehörde (immigration, literally foreigners Authority) are booked at least three months out, but if you have a confirmation paper, proving that you have an appointment, it's not an issue that you don't have a visa yet... As long as you don't try and leave the country.

Jeremy started at his job only a couple of weeks before our tourist visas expired, so we hadn't gone looking for apartments yet. It felt a bit like putting the cart before the horse, so as soon as we had the means to get a visa, with two and a half weeks before we had to move out, we scrambled. Jeremy found us a furnished short-term apartment (3 month contract with allowance to extend for a month at a time) and we spent our visa expiration day moving a mile and a half closer to Jeremy's office. Jeremy had to be at work, so Kiersten (Jeremy's sister who had come to spend the summer with us) and I moved everything from point A to point B. It was a good place for that summer. We traveled with Kiersten, visited Poland and the Czech Republic and Austria and lots of different places in between, and slowly adjusted to some of the pieces of living in Germany. But just a few.

Hanno Kramer's lakehouse in Seddin, June 2017

Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp, Oranienberg, Germany

We stopped somewhere outside of Grunewald on the way home from Peacock Island, the picnic during which a peacock ate bread off of Wes' head, and Kiersten came home with a tick. Good times.

Rakotzbrücke (Devil's Bridge) in Gablenz, Germany

On the Polish border

Oslo's first birthday!

Trip to Munich, visiting Viki and Martina 😂

Kiersten left just before we got our visas, and then we started searching for a not short-term apartment.  We kept extending our lease until we found something significantly cheaper, but the housing market is insane in Berlin, and I had a lot things to learn about apartment hunting, so we weren't successful until December. And we only found something furnished and short-term (4 months maximum kind of short term), but we moved in a week before we headed to the US, paid to keep our suitcases warm, and headed off for a whirlwind of a Christmas/wedding holiday.  We visited Jeremy's parents for Christmas, and the day after, drove to Lubbock for Jace's wedding, then turned around the day after the wedding and went to cram in as much visiting as we could while almost all of us were recovering from the flu. That post will hopefully be sponsored by Nyquil, since that trip definitely was.

Quick trip to Munich in October - Berlin and Viki

Palace-ing

Lane had about 48 hours in Munich, which was the reason for our Munich trip.

So great to see him.

This is just a small representation of Berlin's life in the last... 3 years.

You're only a bad parent if you DON'T take a picture, right?

Jeremy had to work one Saturday, but Berlin got to go with him.

City decorations for Christmas

Lauren Bell got called to Germany AND ended up in our stake! 

We should've worn Just Jumpin shirts.

I sang in the stake Christmas choir, so the boys... entertained themselves.

We'd been back in Berlin for a week when my step-dad called to tell us they were getting sealed, so a week later I hopped on a plane with the boys again, and Jeremy joined us the day before the sealing. I wasn't kidding about paying to keep those suitcases warm. We got back to Berlin, searched down to the wire for a new apartment, and signed a new 12-month contract seven days before our old one expired. We've been here for just over a month (but with traveling, we've only actually slept here maybe three of those weeks), and almost every suitcase is finally unpacked.

In all of the craziness of this year, we've learned a lot. We've made a lot of mistakes, some of them expensive, but many have been averted by smart and kind people we've met. I think it would be fair to say that there have been more frustrating days than fun ones. But the fun ones have been really great. And you know, we are making progress. There are some major things we need to figure out, less-Germany-more-life things, but it's coming.

And the language? Well. Jeremy has navigated our train being canceled, and the new travel plan options, in German. And I said the opening prayer in sacrament meeting on Sunday. So basically... we still have a long ways to go :)

Brita came to visit. And we're still killing it with group selfies.

Berlin on a bus stop post. He's like 6 feet off the ground.

Trip to Gent, pre-DDCB

Berlin with the Spargel (Spargelcup in Beelitz)

I'm still taking pictures of these bears, and Berlin wants to be in every picture.

[title from something just like this by coldplay and the chainsmokers]

I'm so sick of making lists of things I'll never finish

I'm learning that moving is not for the faint of heart. No matter the distance of the move.

Moving is also not for people who enjoy organization, sleep, or happiness.

Okay, so I'm a little dramatic. There are, perhaps, ways of being organized about a move that allow for happiness and sleep. I'm not a terribly organized person- chaos is my style, and I thrive on scrambling to make things happen last minute (product of one procrastinating parent and one perfectionist parent- yes, they were, in fact, trying to kill me) - but with a project as huge as a move, I really have worked hard to be organized because there was too much to do to try and do it all last minute.

Don't worry, we still pretty much did everything last minute.

Not for lack of trying, however. We started downsizing even before we knew were were moving to Oxford (so, in May. We decided on Oxford in June). My in-laws sold all of their furniture and moved across the country for medical school with only a mini-van and their car to take what they still owned, and we were jealous of all the purging they'd done. Of course, the enthusiasm for this idea of downsizing was much greater than our efforts before we actually decided to move, but having the mindset early certainly helped. As soon as we decided we were going, Jeremy and I started listing all of our furniture on KSL and Craigslist and indoor yard sales on Facebook, knowing that we didn't have very long to sell stuff and being unsure of how long it would take to actually sell that stuff, if it would sell at all.

Our dressers sold very first, within 12 hours of listing them. We were literally taking stuff out of our dressers as people were walking in to take them away. Then we sold our couches, which were a few of our only pieces of furniture keeping our clothes from the floor. And a week or so after that, we sold our massive storage shelves. And a few days after that, all of the hangers we have ever owned. So that was fun.

While trying every day not to knock over various piles of clothes, we were also going through everything else in our house and trying to decide what things we were going to keep (either in storage or packed into a suitcase). We based this evaluation on each item's worth to us in time: our catchphrase of the summer quickly became, "Are you going to care [about that] in 10 years?" It is much easier to decide the value of something by trying to imagine what you would actually do with it 10 years from now if you weren't going to see it until then. We don't necessarily intend to be gone that long, but for the sake of making decisions, this exaggeration worked. I started throwing almost everything away. Jeremy, fortunately, is more nostalgic than I am, so some of the memories we've made in the last seven years are actually in tact, squirreled away in someone's basement. But before they were neatly packed into someone's basement, and for the majority of the summer, they covered our house as half-filled tupperware of things we wanted to save, piles of things we weren't sure about, piles of things we still needed to go through, garbage bags full of yard sale-able stuff, garbage bags of stuff going to DI, garbage bags full of garbage, all covered by toppled piles of clothes accented with occasional toys (because we have an increasingly energetic toddler who didn't want to be left out of the fun).

So our house was a disaster area for almost the entire summer, but we felt like we were making progress. Before we arrived at move-out day, we had sold all 5 of our couches, our loft bed and our guest bed, our dining room table and chairs, all dressers and shelving, and Berlin's crib. The only piece of furniture we had left was a Lazy Boy. And that sold at the (second) yard sale within an hour of being set outside.

But that's moving day. I'm getting ahead of myself.

We still hosted when we could, even without a table and chairs. We just brought out food and dishes and set them on the floor. Notice that Berlin is towering above us in his high chair. On this particular occasion, the power went out while I was cooking, so we couldn't even finish preparing our classy, uptown spread. 

I hope we remember this summer for a long time :)

The point of all of these ridiculous details is just to say that we worked hard to plan things out and not do things at the last minute. We had a yard sale at the beginning of July and sold lots, but we didn't bring everything we had to sell outside (it was just way too much, AND we hadn't finished going through everything), so we knew we'd have another yard sale, even though we were successfully selling lots of other random things in between (bikes, hand mixers, tarps, candles, blenders, frames, tablecloths, etc. all online). We planned to have another yard sale right before we left, like on the Saturday before the week we moved out, around Jeremy's birthday (then our house would mostly be empty and we could clean all week before we moved). But it's the home stretch that always is the craziest. And I maybe did it to myself (or to us?). In hindsight I could have simplified my life, but I'm not very good at narrowing down my list. Just adding to it, and thinking all of it is really going to happen somehow.

That Saturday before we moved out, August 8th, was Jeremy's birthday. His 30th birthday. And I know all of the whirlwind maybe shouldn't have stopped, but surely it could just for a party. 30 is a big deal! How could we just breeze past that? I also really wanted to have a going away party at some point, so wasn't I doing myself a favor by killing two birds with one stone?

(Just for the record, that phrase doesn't work if getting the stone, by itself, is far more effort than killing each bird individually would've been.)

But I got it in my head that I wanted to have a party. A surprise party. A party that I started to plan a month before so people from out of town could drive down with plenty of notice, but I also wanted it to be a kind of party that would be worth making the drive for (red flags all over the place. What was I thinking?). Jeremy went to Tennessee for a workshop for three days, the Monday-Wednesday before his birthday, so I took full advantage of him being gone and planned and cooked and decorated and schemed.  But I also worked my tail off on our house because I didn't want Jeremy to wonder how I could make zero progress on the house when I'd had so much time to myself and figure the party out (when he asked me about my day, I couldn't exactly say, "Well, I decorated your friend's house for a party you're not supposed to know about and I didn't even think about the house" now could I?). I ran myself into the ground, but I finished tons of house projects, and for as many hiccups and flying wrenches that the party plans endured, the party went off without a hitch. Jeremy was totally and completely surprised, and he got to see and bid farewell to so many more people than he was expecting.

I didn't take a single picture at the party. And besides a couple of small groups who took pictures with Jeremy, these two pics are about the only ones that were taken that evening. This is at the very beginning of the night when people started trickling in.

And this is about half of the people waiting at the doorway for Jeremy to make his entrance. That's all we got. 30th birthday party and no pictures to show for it :) oh well.

In short, no second yard sale happened that birthday Saturday. And we were moving out the next week.

We decided to still have a yard sale the day we moved out. Our planning/thought process was that by the end of our yard sale (12 or 1PM, realistically), everything would be out of our house. We would finish the cleaning we hadn't during the week, and then we would drive away, putting us at Jeremy's parents' sometime around midnight. Not the most ideal time after a full day of hard work, but still pretty decent for as much as we had to do.

So, naturally, none of that happened.

Our living room at about midnight Friday night, before the yard sale

Our living room Saturday afternoon, after most of the yard sale was over. Not much progress.

Well, actually, we did have a yard sale. It was mostly over by 1PM, and it felt like a raving success because people paid us for more than half of our junk, and we had a place to take the leftovers. But our last customer left after 5PM (because we put everything in bags and boxes, left those outside, and tried to go inside and finish. And people continued to come by and look through the bags and boxes). So we didn't actually have our yard de-junked until about 7. There was intermittent cleaning from the time that we woke up that morning to when our yard was clean, but serious, concentrated cleaning didn't start until 7PM.

For the majority of the night, I could only think of the line from Toy Story when Andy's mom says, "Say 'Bye house!'" 

And Andy replies in such a melancholy way, "Bye house." It makes me incredibly sad to see everything so empty.           

This picture was taken at 4AM. When we finally left. We hardly had energy to be sentimental, but thank heavens Jeremy took a picture. Three years at our first apartment, three years worth of firsts, and I would've left without even glancing back, I was so done with all of the work it took to get it that clean.

We somehow managed 4+ hours of driving in a very packed car full of everything we didn't finish organizing, and everybody but the driver had stuff on their laps. And we promptly collapsed upon arrival.




[title from even if it kills me by motion city soundtrack]

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]