This sucker will have more than one draft so here I go.

Howdy family!

You are getting a mid-year letter because if I wait for Christmas it’ll be too late. We are changing things up in our house. By which I mean… we are getting rid of the house. Yes yes, after that really long remodel… we are getting rid of the house. The bay are is going through an absolutely absurd real estate boom and if we sell the house right now we are 95% sure Noah will get to retire at a fairly young age and if we hold on to the house he is going to be working into his 60’s. I like him and I’d rather spend the time with him.

So we are selling the house. That means we have to live somewhere else. Where? We aren’t sure yet. We have a wide variety of places we are interested in and we want to short-term rent apartments in places and see if we can find friends/home schoolers/tech people who will want us to stay longer. Most of the places we are interested in are other countries.

We want to try (in no particular order): Scotland, Mexico, Canada, New Zealand, Peru, Chile, Ecuador, Costa Rica and we really should spend time in Asia and Africa and I don’t know which countries yet.

So we aren’t settling down any year super soon. I suspect we will be in transit for at least two years and I’m not sure how much longer than that we will spend searching. It depends on if a place feels so much like home that we just can’t bear leaving.

We aim to put our house on the market in October. Thus waiting for a Christmas letter would be a bit behind the times.

We are getting rid of the vast majority of everything we own. We will travel with suitcases and we will put my library in storage. Eventually when we land somewhere permanently my library will follow us but it’ll have to just wait a bit. The next few years it will probably be best to not send us big boxes of stuff for birthdays and Christmas. What will be good presents? Gosh I don’t know. Long letters with stories we can savor? Food? I’m sure my kids will be thrilled about presents that allow them to buy digital copies of books because we are about to go through a long period where they aren’t permitted to buy physical books. This is going to be a challenge for us.

We want to learn how to live lightly. This adventure will be part of it.

Yes, I am bringing my cloth diapers. Every single aspect of handling a baby is more fun when they have an adorably cute butt.

I don’t love this letter.