I have loads of stuff I need to do today but I’m doing this, because if I want this to work then I’m going to have to spend some real time planning to make sure it actually happens. When I say “it”, I mean me and my family upping and travelling the world. Leaving all this behind and almost becoming nomads I suppose. Follow us on our journey to see if we can bring this idea to fruition.
I have no idea if it will work, we’ll just have to see, and if it doesn’t then maybe this blog can help other families see where we went wrong and learn from our mistakes.
There’s lots and lots of reasons why this won’t work. The first one being money. We have none. No savings, no equity in the house and we’re a one income family. To four boys… so yeah, seems impossible right? I’m hoping not but we will see.
So here is a whistle-stop tour of my life and how has all this come about.
I was always fairly certain from around the age of about 9 that this was something I wanted to do. Different experiences compounded that belief for me but I had the same issue back then as I do now; lack of money. As a young adult I thought that a great way of trying to do this would be to join the military. It wasn’t a good idea and even though I had some really great times and made some life-long friends I spent the majority of the 7.5 years I was in trying to find a way to get the hell out!!! Even still it is something I would recommend for a short period of time, maybe 3 or 4 years, but I digress.
I still vividly remember sitting in front of a world map with my cousin and planning my route around the world. We were going to do it together, except then I had my crazy military idea and she got herself a boyfriend, who she subsequently married and had a child with and has also now divorced.
Plan was going well and I managed to visit many places while I was in the military. These were short holidays though rather than actual travelling as such. I visited Cyprus, Spain, Tunisia, Andorra, Thailand, Paris and many parts of the UK. Then I got pregnant…. unplanned but much wanted, I was 22. Things didn’t work out with the father of my eldest and became a single parent. He was a good man but we weren’t right for each other. By the time my eldest was 4 I had met and was engaged to the man I married… and had a further THREE children with… yeah… in for a penny, in for a pound and all that. Life was, and still is, tough. We have 4 boys, all typical in nature and behaviour so I’m sure you can appreciate what day to day life is about. On the whole we find imposing our chaos onto normal society doesn’t have the best results for anyone really so we try and keep ourselves to ourselves. We’ve kind of blindly gotten through the last 9 years in a foggy blur of sleepless nights, nappies, playgroups and nursery rhymes. My dreams were put aside for now as I tried to keep a grasp of my sanity. Tried to embrace the life I now had.
So anyway, we’re tootling along down the path we think is best suited to us. We consider a Steiner education for our middle 2 boys as we think it’s the best way for them. We attended the playgroup from when they were very small and they had a place to start in September 2014. Great! Everything is going as planned and we’re all happy 🙂 Except then on 13th August 2014 our youngest dramatically fails a hearing test. He is diagnosed as being deaf. My whole world crumbled there and then in that room. I was devastated, broken, everything had been torn apart. I’d entered the room with a healthy baby and left with a disabled one. We found out he had been born deaf but the diagnosis didn’t come until he was 15 months old.
All our focus now had to change on how we managed with a deaf child, who also happened to be the first deaf person we’d ever met. I threw myself into it, tried to find out as much as we could about the culture, started to learn sign language (we’re still having those lessons). 2 years in and things started to settle. We tried to find our way back to Steiner education but finances no longer meant we could access it and the bursary they offered us wasn’t enough. My boys were stuck in an inner city mainstream school which was something I’d never intended for and never felt settled within.
In the half term school holidays of May 2017 I went on a holiday to Cornwall and came back literally questioning my entire life. I could barely talk for 2 days. Seriously, I felt that bad. I’d returned home on the Friday then on the evening of the Sunday I sat down with my husband and told him I just couldn’t do this any more. I feel like I’m just dying on the inside. This wasn’t how it was meant to be. What the hell were we doing? It feels like we’re running on a hamster wheel, going nowhere and not even enjoying or believing in what we were doing. The life we have really suits some people but it really isn’t for me. For us. For our family. I’ve had this conversation many times with my husband but he’s never been sure except this time he agreed! He could see what was happening, how we were both feeling and he finally agreed to make this work. So now we’ve got to make it work. We’re not sure how. Not a clue. What we’ve done so far is decided on a date. July 2020. Around 3 years from now. It should give us enough time to plan properly and save. We’re just not in a position to get up and go. So please do follow us, send us your tips, wish us luck in our adventure, maybe try it yourself! Looking forward to sharing this journey with you.
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Dream Big Family World Travel 