HI HO, HI HO, It's off to Ho Chi Minh we go...
I'm a wreck today. I think I'm suffering from "oh my God! What have we done?!" syndrome, with a little premature grieving thrown in for good measure. I haven't even begun to worry about all the things we need to do. I'm still too emotional, worrying about all the things we're leaving. In my saner moments, I know we've got plently of time to prepare ourselves for this move. The actual packing process should go pretty smoothly. The hard part will be deciding what to take, and what to leave, but in some small way, I think having these extra months to contemplate the move will make it easier for me to leave some non-essentials behind. It's just stuff after all. What I will have trouble leaving are the people in our lives, particularly my parents and their dogs Beau and Sadie. Sounds silly to miss dogs, but ya know, they don't e-mail, and they don't talk on the phone, and worse than that, they don't know you still care about them when you're gone. As for my parents, they do e-mail, read our blog, and talk on the phone, but it's been nice having them so close for the last several years (they live in the Atlanta area too) and I know I'm really going to miss them. I'm not as worried about missing my friends for some reason. Most of my best friends live far away from us now, so our day to day relationship won't change much with regards to the move-I can still e-mail them and talk on the phone, and I hope/believe Mark and I will still try to see them at least once a year regardless of where we live. The blog will also help us keep in contact, I hope, that was the original reason for starting this.
I know everything will probably be fine, and truthfully, it's so much easier to do this now then it was when my parents moved overseas for the first time more than twenty years ago thanks to the internet. But it's still a little scary, and a little sad to leave our present lives behind.