Tomorrow morning, we are leaving our temporary home here in Lucan at 8 am, and I am dropping Liz & Brenna (& Méabh) off at Brenna’s school (tomorrow is induction day for her…Erin’s induction day is tomorrow.)

The boot (Irish for your car’s trunk) will be packed full of our stuff, which I’ll drop off in Raheny, then drive back out here to Lucan to pick up Hannah, Erin and the rest of our stuff…then we’ll head back to Raheny.

Hopefully, everything will fit in the second trip, and trip number 3 will not be required…After Liz and Brenna get home, we’ll make a list of household items we’ll need: an electric kettle, a clothes horse (we didn’t end up with a dryer…we thought there was when we first looked at the house…it is a freezer…guess we should have actually opened it and looked inside), trash baskets, coffee mugs, pillows…frying pans…stuff like that, and head over to Ikea…we’ll have to leave the kids at home otherwise we wouldn’t be able to fit anything in the car, as our boot is quite small (just seeing if you’re paying attention).

Then over the next few days, we’ll be coming up with an additional list as we realize all of the things we need that we gave away.

Later in the week one or two of us will take yet another trip up to Ballybay to get our stuff that is stored there, and then within the next 2 weeks, the stuff we shipped over in late June is set to arrive.

While I really like moving to a new place and exploring the whole area…I hate the process of getting ready to move…It is probably still one of the major stress points in my life…and yet we are set to move for the 4th time in 10 weeks. (I just realised that in the past 10 weeks I have spent at least 2 nights in a row at 10 different places…not counting the 2 nights I’ve spent on Aer Lingus jets)

It feels a bit like a roller coaster the way our family moves…you know the move is coming (kind of like when the roller coaster climbs up the hill…but you’re not really sure what the drop will look like…and that last week or so when you have to sort through the rest of your stuff…stick it in bags and get it to the next place (loop the loop…corkscrew all in one) and then you’re in a temporary place for a while & thing calm down a bit…until the process starts all over again.

Well, our coaster is finally pulling back into the terminal and we’re looking forward to putting our feet on solid ground again.

No more living out of a suitcase; no more eating in someone else’s kitchen; no more trying to keep Méabh from screaming as she runs around exploring her latest temporary home. No more putting this or that off until we are in our own place. Back to regular meals at regular times.

While we are so grateful to everyone who opened their homes to us over the past 10 weeks…(and who breathed a sigh of relief as we moved on to our next place)…we are really looking forward to sleeping in our own place.

As I mentioned recently…Liz & I are both homebodies…and at least for me, this whole process has left me feeling a bit untethered…and has made even the simplest of projects feel more difficult….even reading feels like work at this point.

Thanks to all who have prayed for us as we’ve gone through this…it’s been a crazy ride. Thanks to all of you who’ve supported us with one-time gifts, and especially those of you who’ve been supporting us financially on a monthly basis…we couldn’t have made it without all of you!

Now the real adventure can begin.