When Adam and I were in college, he wore glasses.  One day, our dog ate those glasses.  Adam went seven months without wearing glasses.  He told me he didn’t really need them and continued to drive us around Austin.  We were going to Sam’s one day and decided to pop into the optometrist to see about getting a new set of glasses for Adam, even though he didn’t really need them. The optometrist projected the vision test on the large white wall. P G R E O.  Can you tell me these letters Adam? Silence.  The letters got larger.  The silence continued until there was a single capital letter A taking up the entire wall.  Adam confidently yelled “R!”

Turns out, he really did need glasses.  Or contacts.  It is such a pain when we go on vacations and he forgets something or one of the kids misplaces his glasses or we go to waterpark and forget contacts.  So in preparation for worldschooling and as a long overdue gift  himself, Adam got Lasik last week.  The doctor here in Richmond is the foremost Lasik expert and did Tiger Woods’ eyes!  He drove to his own post op the next day. He still can’t believe how easy it is to just wake up and not have to fish around for an apparatus to help him see.

Similarly, I am trying to rid of everything that we are dependent on.  I don’t want to carry menstrual products around the world.  I have my Diva Cup I love very much that will free me from having to worry about that.  Dominic is severely allergic to everything.  He has been on allergy shots for over a year and I talked to his allergy nurse about doing some kind of accelerated program to get him off shots and  immune to the world by the time we need to leave. By the grace of God, we will also have our youngest potty trained at night and won’t have to bring any pull-ups or anything like that.  He will be 3.5 when we leave.

Today we close on a house for Gom!  We bought a small house in Richmond for my mom (the kids call her Gom) to rent from us (which will make her monthly payments much cheaper than her small apartment) and for our dogs to live in while we are worldschooling.  I originally asked my brother Michael, a senior in college and future cop, if he would watch our two big dogs while we were travelling around the world.  He told me he just couldn’t make it work so we started looking at other options.  My mom offered to take them but she has her own three-legged rescue psychotic fluff ball named Bentley and two cats. Her apartment wasn’t going to work for the whole farm.  So we found this house on a big lot and we are building a fence around it so the animals can roam.  Her rent will cover the mortgage so it shouldn’t cost us anything other than the down payment and repairs here and there.

Since we Airbnb our home every now and then, we will now have a place all of us can fit (kind of, its 2 bedrooms)!  We used to board the dogs during Airbnb, now we can take them to my mom’s house.  So, this is why planning for our worldschooling adventure two years early was a good idea.  Also, this sounds very expensive but it really wasn’t.  We found a very cheap house in a…changing neighborhood?  Nothing dangerous but Wells Fargo was very skeptical of our plan to use it as a rental. Anyway, we sold our rental house in Texas and used part of the profit for this down payment (the rest is our worldschooling budget).  Again, my mom will be paying the mortgage so we aren’t taking on any new monthly payments.  This is also something that will benefit us all in the long run because my mom can use this as her retirement plan and live in the house practically for free once it is paid off.  This beats her previous retirement plan of having us push her off a boat while at sea.  This was seriously her plan until last month, the rest of us weren’t “on board” so to speak.

Hanzo is a 1 year old Rottweiler that we brought into our home purely for protection.  He has become part of the family and takes his job very seriously.  In fact, we are trying to help him see that every person who comes in our home is not a criminal.  Perry is our ten year old red Chow and she is very tolerant of her Hanzo puppy that follows her around all day nipping her tail.  Bella is our super crazy 14 year old bar cat.  I found her at the bar I used to work at in Texas when she was only a few weeks old.  She has schizophrenia and all of the kids are terrified of her.  When they see cat, they approach it very cautiously as if all cats randomly attack you as you are sleeping in your bed.  She waits until the kids are about two years old to start treating them like the rest of us, until then she lets them lay on her and pull her tail. Its unbelievable.  We will miss them very much while we are gone but at least now I know they will be together, happy, and overfed by their indulgent Gom.