Holland, Holland and mixed emotions

What a week! The past week was a lot about Holland. Or really, to much was about Holland. We are still here in Raynham, we want to enjoy our time here, but it is unavoidable to also work on our remigration to Holland. Responses from some friends in Holland after writing a blog or a text to them about looking forward to see them again, are often followed by: don’t think about the move to much yet, enjoy your time in America while you still can. And yes, we want to, but moving a household of 4 in general is a big job and Boy…with Corona around the corner all the time, the weather being really really cold (often times to cold to hang out outside with our friends), work for school that goes up and down in how much work it is and therefore so much time on my hand to do things for our move. Should I just sit and only watch Netflix and not think about moving at all for another 3 months? We have friends that had to move in 30 days and they did it! It was a bit stressful and not fun at all, but it’s doable. It is an option. We can just pretend we are not going anywhere and then end of May we step up our game and call a moving agency for a container to ship our stuff and we will just jump into a plane that still has 4 seats left for us (that won’t be an issue probably, that’s goodJ).

Yeah, that won’t happen. For all of you that have known me for a long time (but even for you that have only known me a short time), I don’t do that! I plan, I organize, I anticipate, I work ahead, I make lists…on pretty much everything. I’m good at it, it makes me happy, it gives me clearance in my head and so that’s my thing! It’s funny, because I actually got a lot of criticism before moving to the States 4 years ago on this subject. In a process like this it is unclear until about 2 months before leaving whether everything with the Visa will work out. So you find out very late whether you can go on with your plan or not. But when we started the official paperwork in January 2017 (and had no idea what would come from it), we started cleaning out our house, I started making lists, I planned goodbye parties for our family but also for Pim an Nynke and their friends, I booked an English teacher, read read and read more about moving to Amerika etc. People thought I was overreacting, everything would work out just fine and I was putting way to much thought in it. But then we came to Amerika and our kids did AWESOME, we acclimated pretty fast and all the prepping contributed so much! (Ergo, ALWAYS follow your own gut on what might be good for you and for your family. It doesn’t really matter what others say about things this big. You can listen and take from those feedback moments and advises what you can use and move forward from there. Everyone is different and everyone does things different… and that is OK!)

Ok, getting back to this week! It was cold, like reeeeaaaaaally cold! I must say, I get cold easily, but still….It was cold! (Snowing while I’m writing this blog btw). So this week we mainly stayed home. We have a FunRaiser for school coming up, collecting soft goods like clothes and books, so past weekend was a perfect moment to start purging our closets. The kids have grown so much and Erik and I shrunk quite a bit over the past year. Erik also never goes through his clothes so I started Friday night with my own closets and looked at everything with the question in my mind: Am I gonna want this in Holland? Then I took out all Erik’s clothes, made a shift with the things I like and asked him to go through the rest the next day. And then, as he didn’t need my help with that, on Saturday after Dutch School I started working on Pim’s stuff. After they finished Dutch School and came back from Ice-skating lessons I made Pim try on a bunch of stuff. Done and done….that was an easy one. As soon as I had found the perfect fitting shirt for him I just compared all the other shirts to that. Shorter than that? Thrown out! Pim first went through everything to tell me which ones he wouldn’t wear anyways (he has been picky like that since he was about 2, I’ve stopped convincing him to wear anything long ago)

And then the challenging part came…Nynke’s clothes. Nynke is the one that has changed the most this past year. She is turning into this beautiful young lady and her body is changing so much, I have no idea what would fit and look good on her at this point. Monday morning (we had the day of as it was Martin Luther King day) I started the day with an hour walk outside while chatting with my mom on the phone. After that I wanted to start going through Nynke’s clothes with her. I mentioned already that she is getting so big, and when I arrived home she surprised me as she had already started to try on some of her clothes. We worked hard for 1,5 hours and ended up with 5 30 gallon bags full of clothes for the fundraiser and a whole bag of clothes for some friends that we know loves to wear Nynke’s clothes after Nynke grew out of it. I was in such a flow, and Pim had asked me to switch his furniture around in his room. So I decided to move on, the kids were playing outside with friends and loved to see both their rooms all cleaned up and furniture moved around. Earlier in the week I had worked on our craft and schoolstuff closet (I don’t know exactly how to say it). Cleaned it all out, found so crazy many pencils, crayons, glue sticks, erasers etc etc…Together with all the stuff like it, that I found in their rooms and in other drawers etc, I have a nice donation to Pim’s teacher. It really is insane to just buy everything new at the start of each school year, but when you need it all in September you can’t find anything so we just buy it again.

So far the purging. The other thing I did is reaching out to moving companies. Thanks to a post on facebook I received many names for companies to check out quotes. I have reached out to a bunch of them and just received the first quote. It is good to see that things are less expensive than we thought it would be, that gives some perspective for sure. It would include the moving company to pack it all and to document everything for customs. We could all do it ourselves and safe some money there, but I told Erik that I would rather have it done (if possible money wise) and to be able to have the time that we won’t have to spend on that, to make some last memories with our friends here in Amerika. It looks like that is possible now, which is great!

Another thing that goes on in our house about Holland is talking about the things we are looking forward to. It’s not a daily thing, but it comes up once in a while. During dinner this weekend Pim initiated it this time: “everyone take turns telling what food they want to eat first”, then “everyone take turns about who they would want to pick us up at the airport”. These kind of things are fun to talk about and will get the kids excited about this big step in our life. We take turns in being sad about moving back. As we are so sad leaving everything and everyone here behind, that can come up any time. But talking about these things help us look forward to the positive things of our move back to Holland.

And then the last thing that made us think and talk about our move back to Holland the past week were the two texts and a phone call I received from different friends. All three mentioning to me that their child has been crying about us leaving or just feeling upset about it. And it might sound weird, and when we rationalize it, it off course shouldn’t be the way we feel, but we sometimes feel guilty towards our loved ones. That started before leaving in Holland in 2017. It was a great adventure for us to be moving to Raynham, but we were picking up our kids and dropping them in another country 5.500 km’s away from Holland where they didn’t even speak the language. Taking them away from their grandparents, aunts and uncles, cousins, friends. We were doing this to them, the kids and our family and friends! And then now, we have made such wonderful friends here that were just living their lives just fine, and then we show up and start loving them and now we leave them again. It is especially heartbreaking to see those little ones having a hard time with this, even though we also realize how special it is to have these friends that might come visit to see how we live in Holland. The fact that we were able to show so many people here in Raynham how things go in Holland, or Europe, has been wonderful too. And for us it has been so special to be able to learn about another country by really living the life in this country. The thing that helps us with this guilt, is that we have always been straight forward about our stay here being temporary, even though it has felt at times that we felt we wanted to stay here forever. But it is a hard thing to see and experience. We are hoping for warmer weather very soon so we can hang out with our friends again soon!

For now I’m gonna make myself a delicious cappuccino in one of my favorite mugs from one of my dear friends here, that mug will def come to Holland (I'm obsessed with mugs!!!) so I can think of my friends when I have my Dutch coffee! Will be continued!

XOXO Wendy