The German Mom

It is finally happening! We’ve been dreaming about this moment since 2020 and have been continuously planning to make this move a smooth experience. 
Yet, no matter how much planning and organizing we’ve done since, I am still feeling extremely overwhelmed with this move. 

It all started in early Summer of 2020. The world had been testing the waters and coming slowly out of the lockdowns due to global pandemic that no one wants to talk about anymore. The days were getting more warmer and I was aching for some rainy days. Colorado is one of the driest places I’ve ever lived in and we’ve experienced more local wildfires in the last few years. I started to hate the summers here. It was either too hot to play outside, too smokey to play outside and due to the COVID outbreak indoor places for children were closed. 

I wanted more nature, more trees, more rain, greener gras and more options for our family to enjoy the outdoors. My husband and I have always talked about living in Germany some day. I grew up there and it is my home. But we didn’t want to move due to my mother living in Colorado as well. 

Well, it was one of the first times I saw my mom after the initial lockdowns and we chatted about how hot the weather was getting. She mentioned about wanting to live in Germany again and I jokingly told her, we wanted to move too, but only stayed BECAUSE OF HER. 

It was that day, we made that BIG decision to move our little family to Europe. Of course we didn’t know at the time what COVID was going to do to the world. We talked about trying to move around Spring time 2021. My mom would stay in Colorado at first to work until she officially retired and then would join us. We had a little under a year to start organizing and planning this year. It felt like a reasonable time frame. 

We researched all of the requirements for immigrating into Germany and started looking at possible jobs for my husband. It became clear that he needed some kind of German knowledge and prove that he could converse on a professional level. So he started taking German lessons.

It was EASY in the beginning. We made a list of all the items we wanted to take to Germany and began to declutter our household. There were lots of toys, kids clothes and household items we weren’t really using and were able to declutter right away. Once a holiday happened, we packed up what we wanted to take to Germany and gifted away everything else. 

We started a plan on how we were going to approach this move. We would sell our home, move in with my mother and then move to Germany. But we had to clean out and repaint the basement of her house before we could make that transition to move out of our house. With covid still raging through the world we wanted to protect our family by moving out of the house first before putting it on the market. This was a good possibility for us as my mother lived nearby.

Shortly after Christmas in 2020 my mother was diagnosed with stage 4 breast cancer. She was in great health and this diagnosis came unexpected to us. We put our move on the backburner and prayed for my mother’s recovery. It also didn’t feel like the right time to move. Not because of my mother, but in general I wasn’t ready to leave Colorado yet. 

My mother spent most of the spring and summer seasons in 2021 with chemo therapy, the BIG surgery and radiation, while we continued to keep her in our thoughts, send her funny pictures from the kids and continued to declutter our house. 

You don’t realize how much STUFF you have until you pack everything up for a move. 

It was Christmas of 2021 and we no longer had a Christmas tree. We had packed up all of our absolute favorite Christmas decorations and gave away everything we didn’t need to bring along on the move. At the time we didn’t know about my mother’s cancer and we were still planning on moving before our next Christmas. 

So now that it was Christmas season again, mine and my husband’s favorite season of the year, it felt weird not having a Christmas tree. We looked at getting a real tree but quickly realized that a decent tree was way more expensive than the plastic trees that you can reuse. So one day my husband found a reusable tree that was smaller than our previous one and budget-friendly. Even though it was small, it was perfect!

January 2022 we made the decision to make this year THE YEAR to move. No matter what was going to happen.

Every weekend we spent cleaning and renovating my mother’s basement and packing up the house with moving boxes. We didn’t need everything, but there were still lots of books, board games, (my) Lego sets, and the kids’ toys that we couldn’t part with just yet. Once the basement at my mother’s was finally ready for us, we started the process with a realtor to get our house ready for the market. 

Then we spent every weekend packing up moving boxes, cleaning out rooms and moving stuff my mom’s. It was exhausting and the kids weren’t having much fun either. Thank God for good neighbors and letting our kids play with their kids whenever we were doing boring moving stuff.

So here we are. It’s April of 2022 and we finally sold our house, moved to my moms, sent our moving boxes with crates in a container to Germany and approaching Aren’s last day of work.

I can finally say it out loud. WE ARE MOVING TO GERMANY!