Consider Making a 5 Year Travel Plan!

00:00:02
Speaker 1: Hi. This is Laura Vandercamp. I'm a mother of five, an author, journalist, and speaker. And this is Sarah Hartunger. I'm a mother of three, a practicing physician and blogger. On the side, we are two working parents who love our careers and our families. Welcome to best of both worlds. Here we talk about how real women manage work, family, and time for fun, from figuring out childcare to mapping out long term career goals. We want you to get the most out of life. Welcome to best of both worlds. This is Laura. This is episode two hundred and twenty two. We are going to be talking about the five year travel Plan. Yes, we're talking about traveling for the next five years. Sarah and I have both realized that we haven't traveled much in the past eighteen months. Well, we traveled some, but not that much, and we certainly have places we'd like to go with our families. So we both have recently talked to our families and brainstorm where we would like to go over the next few years. And so we thought that this approach might be useful to you as well. So we're going to advocate for doing it and talk a little bit about why and where we're going over the next five years. Sarah, why did you decide to do this? Because I did it because you did, so I'll get the reasoning from you. I don't really remember what prompted me to do it. I think it was more just well, okay, I have a friend, a really good friend who lives near here, and we tend to always talk about future travel together, like, oh, let's do this trip together. And they're a family we have traveled with before, and so I started to think, like, well, how do I keep track, you know, how old my kids are going to be with each year, and what kind of trip And I think I'm also at this juncture where I'm realizing that travels about to get a lot more easy and more fun. So it's it's just a fun exercise to think about, like, oh, my gosh, in two years, I'm going to have you know, a five to six year old and Eve eleven to twelve year old, and like a ten year old, and that kind of travel is going to look so different from you know, two years ago, when I had a toddler screaming at the top of her lungs in the middle of the night, and so I wanted to write out the different years with the ages, and then I just started to think about, like, hmm, you know, life is short. Life with your kids is very short. We have a limited number of these breaks, Like my husband and I are on call a lot, the kids are in school. We have to really like be strategic, like in fact, even though COVID restrictions are winding down for now and hopefully you will stay that way, although who knows. You know, we can't actually go anywhere this winter break because we're both working like the whole time, in part to make up for last year's like COVID debacle. But you know, we really have to think ahead when we want to do stuff, and so I don't know, I just sat there one day and wrote out like twenty twenty one, twenty two, twenty twenty three, twenty twenty, twenty twenty five. I wrote the ages the kids would be at each of those, so I could kind of think about what would be like an age appropriate trip, like when would certain things be fun? And then I just brainstormed a possible spring break destination, a possible summer trip, and a possible winter break trip. Are we always going to travel those three times. Maybe not, but maybe. I mean it is something that I value. I think it's quality time and wonderful memories, you know, with the kids, and again time with them is life is short and time with them is short. Yeah, definitely. Yeah. The more I thought about it, it's like this, You know, I often think about the whole year at once. And in fact, I just answered a question from a magazine for an upcoming article about why you should plan one year at a time. Apparently there's some day in January or February that's national Plan your Vacation Day. I love these made up holidays, so they are using that as a news hook of to do it a piece about this, and I was like, ah, well, hey, I wouldn't even do it before January, but whatever you do it. My first thought was like, if there's a plan your vacation day, I want to plan mine the week before so that so, yeah, I don't fear not like arrowing everyone's I don't think it's a widely observed holiday. Let me just let me just put that out there. But then I was like, well, how about five years? And obviously you have to plan very loosely. The further you go into the future, you're probably not going to actually be able to book a hotel for four years from now in many cases, but the five year travel plan has a few benefits. First, he can make sure that everyone gets their interests covered. So if people have a destination they would love to go to and they know it's coming up in the next few years, then they may be less likely to advocate it for any given time. As you're debating what you do for a particular vacation, you can start getting excited about these trips. You can make financial plans to accommodate them. So, for instance, if you want to make a I don't know family trip to Australia in three years, that might require some advance planning financially, and therefore you can start setting aside money for it. If you know that's something you want to do, you can prepare it in other ways, like if you're going to have to have a kid learned to ski by the time a certain vacation is coming up, or if people are going to want to get their scuba diving licenses, or or brush up on your Spanish. You spoke it in college but haven't spoken it since, and you want to go to a Spanish speaking country now, it would be a good time to get that duo lingo app back out if you know you're going to go to a Spanish speaking country in the next year or two. You can also get buy in on smaller group trips which you could consider as part of the travel portfolio for the next five years, like each parent taking an individual older child somewhere while the other color covers the little kids or whatever. And if you will be taking extended family obviously you want to give them a heads up as well, so they know too. I don't know if they've got vacation scheduling issues or kids in school that they want to compare dates with you for say twenty twenty three or something like that. So there's just a lot of reasons to think about it. Again, you're not going to like book the exact dates necessarily in twenty twenty four because like, you don't even know what your school calendar is going to be then, although you could figure out when Christmas is or when Rashashana is or whatever dates your school has off. However you can think of it. Yeah, I highly recommend doing you know, even as much as I love to plan on paper. This was one I prefer to have in my Apple Notes doc or on you know, an online way, so that I can easily delete and you know, not have to worry about messing up my beautiful list. I've already made changes to it. Obviously, there was twenty twenty. I think I had never had booked as much travel in my life compared to what I had planned for twenty twenty. So I think I think the good news is if we have something like that happen again. I'm not going to say we're all going to take it well, because I think it would hurt after just having done it. But let's say we have something like that happened like ten years from now. I think I don't know. I personally learned a lesson like you can't count on anything. So these are these plans are like if if we can, if it works, Not like I'm expecting everything that I've written down to perfectly come to fruition. Because Annabel already changed her mind about where she'd like to go and we'll talk about that in a little bit, and I already change something around. Yeah, I mean life is unknowable. I mean it is completely unknowable. And you know, if, as I say to people, sometimes, if twenty twenty was the first time of your life, you realize that you've led a very charmed life. But you know, that was certainly a reminder that, you know, we can't necessarily know what the year is going to bring. In terms of our travel. We had a lot of great travel planned for twenty twenty as well. You know, Sarah and I were going to go to Germany together. We will have to revisit that at some other point or go somewhere else together, but we'll make a trip at some point. My choir was going to Israel and Jordan. Now I had already decided I wasn't going to do that trip for sure when I learned that I was pregnant in twenty nineteen and that I would have the baby in late twenty nineteen. And you know, that was for the summer of twenty twenty. It's not going to take two weeks to go on an international trip when I had a six month old, But that was something I had been considering. And then Michael and I were going to go to a for a work trip for him at one point later in the year, and Obviously none of those happened. But on the other hand, we got to do some other domestic travel that was kind of cool. I took my big kids to Yellowstone in fall of twenty twenty, which was something that was on my bucket list, and because we weren't making other trips, I said, well, we could do this one. And we went out in nature exploring the national park. You know, it's so cool to see the changing leaves in that environment. It snowed one morning in September, and because it fall comes very early, winter comes early. It was. It was amazing. I'm really glad we did it, And so it's still fun to think about what kind of trips you would like to take, even if the exact trips you thought you would take don't happen. Because Yellowstone had been a trip I knew I wanted to take with my kids, and when I realized that other trips were not happening, I said, well, we can move that up from a future year and do that this time. Totally makes sense, something very nature focused that, Hey, your kids have been like understimulated, so they probably were in a better shape to like appreciate this beautiful Also, just because everyone had canceled their plans or they had canceled reservations and then opened it back up. We could get a really good spot. I mean, we aren't our room overlooked Old Faithful, so we could like sit in bed and watch it explode. And I can tell you from past trips because I have gone to Yellowstone in the past, it's hard to get that room. So because of you know, the pandemic, it was available, and so that was really cool. I mean there were other things that weren't available, like we had to get take out from like a canteen for every meal. But on the other hand, we were watching Old Faithful, So you know, some good, some bad. You take it as it comes, all right, So Sarah, let's start with your five year plan and we'll get through a few of this before we need to take our break. All right, Well, first, I guess i'll introduce the concept. Can I talk about that the ten year old? Okay? Okay, So I don't know when I came up with this, but at some point I may not have even had kids yet, but I was like, I think it would be cool if when our kids are ten they get to pick where the I think I was just fantasized about what I would have liked to do when I was ten, because this would have been like the best thing ever. We can let them pick a family trip, like anywhere in the forty eight States, wherever they want to go, and it could be like North Dakota, like I don't care. We'll plan something fun wherever they want. And then maybe when they're fifteen, I came up with that arbitrarily, they can pick an international trip. Now, there's probably gonna be limits to that. I don't think we're going to go to like Asia for a month or something just because it's the fifteen year old wanted to, but we might as well leave it open and see what they come up with. And yeah, so I came up with that, and now we like almost have a ten year old and we've actually it's been wonderful because when Annabelle and I end up going for walks, the topics of our discussion are always number one, what she wants to do for her birthday party, Number two, various planner stuff she wants to get, and number three her ten year old trip. Like those are our like topics that we cycle through, and so I don't know, it's been a fun thing to think about together for a long time. She had said she wanted to go to Colorado, but then she decided there were too many wild the animals there and pivoted to d C, which I'm actually kind of really excited about because she will turn ten in April, which is terry blossoms season, so we could actually time that really nicely if we're lucky, because that's when spring break is as well. So anyway, twenty twenty two, it's Annabell's birthday trip for spring break. The summer is going to be some New England stuff because I do have my college reunion and I think we're going to do another little New England trip and probably stop to visit my parents as well around the time of camp drop off, because I could talk about that another episode, but that's happening. And then in December, I'm hoping that we go for our first family ski trip, so kids in ski school they've never done it before, some totally shock to the system for their Floridian selves. And then for twenty twenty three, I have spring break maybe in like Asheville and North Carolina to see my sister. This summer, I'm hoping for an Alaska Disney cruise, and you mentioned saving. I actually have a little savings bucket that I had like started, and then when we canceled it, I just like left the money there. So I'm like, okay, this very overpriced adventure, Like we're good, we can take it at any more. And then are you at least getting interest in that account? I hope you're getting some, like if you've locked up, I mean it's not multiple Yeah, you know, we're well that could be a whole other episode. I probably should be getting. You know, we get plenty of interest in most of our money, but I I'm sure I have way too. This is a terrible conversation we should have started. No, but it actually matters, Like I mean, if you are having a specific saving account and you're bothering to put money away more than you're ahead of, I should throw it into the a tax to the taxable brokerage. That would probably be a smarter thing to do. If it's well, no, you wouldn't want to lose the money. Yeah, so you don't have to lose it. I don't want to necessarily put it in index funds because if the market tanks, then you've lost you know, fifteen percent of your money, and of the course, like you could gain fifteen percent, you could lose fifteen percent, but just that you don't want to be getting point oh two percent interests on it, right, So I mean that's like every bank. I think we have it TMI in one of those online banks that is slightly better than that, but there's no interest that's good anymore. Wow, this took a turn. All right, Let's take a short term bonds, short term bond funds. All right, talk to your account next, next up, No, let's take our ad. We'll be right back. I can't. All right, Well, we're back talking about our five year travel plans. With the slight digression of where you put the funds if you are saving specifically for specific trips. I'm sure our listeners have great ideas. So if anyone has come up with a you know, way to fun trips that you know that's what the money is for, but you're not getting ridiculously puny amounts of interest on it, please let us know. That would be a great service to all of our listeners that we can share. So you guys were talking the cruise and skiing. I think we're up to twenty twenty four. Now we are, and in twenty twenty four, my children, if you'd like to know, will be six eleven turning twelve. And I don't know why I did it in this order, but and then nine turning ten, so six nine turning ten, eleven turning twelve. And we had Cameron's choice for spring break because he will have his tenth birthday summer. I was thinking Portland Seattle Whistler, which is actually a recreation of a trip we did in twenty twenty eighteen when Genevieve had just learned to walk. We actually had a great time, but I think we'll have a great time again, and we have a lot of friends in that area. And then in December, I'm thinking, either we ski if it's been a happy thing and we want to just keep doing that, or maybe that's the year we go to Hawaii, because I love Hawaii. Hawaii would be fun. And then finally my twenty twenty five was genev Oh, no, there's another one too, So this goes on. I'm sorry, Genevieve seven, Cameron's eleven, Nadaville's thirteen, Maybe another cruise, Grand Canyon, Yosemite time to do that, and then skiing again. Maybe we'll have to see how this whole skiing thing goes. And then for nobody likes to ski, I guess this will rework the whole five year plan. I feel like they're gonna like this. I mean, I like to ski, Josh likes to ski. Cameron, there's no doubt in my mind that he will. He'll like it, He'll like it. The question is the other two. The other two Annabelle is a big black box. There we will I'll let you all know. And then twenty twenty six, when I have an eight year old and twelve year old and a fourteen year old, I was thinking, well, spring break, I don't know, somewhere like Nashville or Austin, summer or international trip maybe Iceland or Denmark, the Netherlands. And then December either skiing or some kind of island. And then I also added, at Josh's request, a family bike trip. He took a New England biking trip with his parents that actually has like a million hilarious kind of set, not sad, but like unfortunate tales associated with it, like cars broken down, et cetera. But like that trip has lived it's mileage in stories, and I think he's hoping to recreate it, although maybe not with like broken down cars. Yeah, there's some really cool bike trips like you can take those as a group internationally. I did one with RII many years ago to bike through France, which was pretty cool, you know, seeing the countryside of France by bike. And then mikel and I did a bike trip in Vietnam with going through the villages in back country of Vietnam through the Mekong Delta. We actually went through a local Vietnamese travel agency. It was one of these random things I love the Internet, like because we sort of looked at like who are the American tour operators contracting with? Because the way it works is like the Americans then contract with local companies and they sort of take their cut and put you with there. So like, well, let's cut out the middleman, like go hire directly the Vietnamese company. And so we had a very affordable biking trip. I mean, once we got to Vietnam, it cost money to get there, but you know, we were just biking through the countryside, just the two of us. That was great with our guide. So some to consider you can do that internationally, not just in America. Yeah, we had this discussion because you had suggested we do it, and so I asked my kids where they wanted to go over the next five years. So Jasper wants to go to Paris, partly for the city, like he wants to see the Eiffel Tower, he wants to see a show in Paris, he likes theater and stuff like that, but also to go see euro Disney, which is in France. So that sounds awesome. He is okay taking his other siblings. So theoretically, like we could do this as like even a long weekend trip. It's possible to do Europe as a long weekend. It's a little crazy, but something that could do. Sam wants to go to Japan, so that was you know, he has been really pushing this. He's sent me texts with like the best things to do in Japan. We're going to a sushi restaurant soon. He wants to. He loves Japanese food. He doesn't want to take his siblings. He wants me to take him to Japan. So we'll see if that that could could happen. I mean, we'll see the problem there is it can't happen anytime soon because Japan is still enforcing a ten day quarantine for vaccinated travelers, which both of us are. But anyway that hopefully COVID will be better and that will change in the course of the next year or two, and then maybe we can consider doing that because while my husband might be willing to cover for a week, I don't think he'll also want to cover a ten day quarantine plus the week, so that that may be more in the future. The kids also mentioned Norway. Michael lived in Norway for five years, so it's a destination that he and I have been to a few times, but it would actually be a great summer family trip do Scandinavia, so Norway, Denmark. There's like a Lego land in Denmark, I think because that's where it's based. Sweden has great stuff as well, castles, the Fjords and Norway are beautiful, so that could be a really awesome trip to do those three countries. I'm thinking maybe we can even push for summer twenty twenty three. On that Henry will be three and a half. Maybe we'd been better off waiting till he's four and a half, but at some point Jasper's gonna leave too, so we you know, and while I hope he'll come home for the summers, I can't count on that happening, so you know, we got to keep that in mind as we are. That's so sad. That's wow, that's like kind of wow. Yeah. And then Hawaii, which we might do as like a spring break or Christmas trip some year. I think again, it's a long flight, so I'm you know, Henry needs to be old enough to reliably watch videos because otherwise it's just miserable. We went when Ruth was five. We did not take but she six five or six. We didn't take Alex with us, he was two, and you know, even her, it was rough, like the older boys just watched movie after movie the whole way. But she got a little restless, as you do. I got restless, you know, adults just keep a little bit more tabs on it. So, yeah, that's on our list. We'll see, we'll see which of those destinations. I don't have exact times for all of those, but I think, you know, in the next five years, I do believe we could do those. We could do you know, Paris, Japan, Norway, and Hawaii. Oh, my gosh, that sounds amazing. Yeah, I purposely exactly. The flight and the time change is the limiting factor for Hawaii, I think. But the thing is like there are elements of the travel that are just going to stick, right, and there's nothing you can do about that. So either you decide that it's going to be worth it because you want to see the place, or you don't. But it's not like you're going to magically not have a time change going to Hawaii or magically get a shorter flight. So true, but like doing that with an eighteen month well, and no, I wouldn't do. To me, that's like not worth it, decidedly not worth the pain. But once your kids are five, right, like you know, no, totally, yeah, totally it could be. It could be doable. Like it won't be fun, but it's doable. So we have some tips for family travel that we would like to share a few that Sarah and I have found work really well. Number one, use Airbnb or Verbo instead of hotels when you can. Sarah, you've had some personal experience with this, right, hotels, Yes, we've all heard about that. And then we've had a recent Verbo experience that was wonderful. So yeah, I've seen the light. Yeah. I mean if you have a baby who fusses going down or gets up earlier, that it just is that much harder when you're worried about everyone else in the hotel hearing you. Plus being able to have multiple bathrooms, for instance, can be convenient if there are many of you who might need to use the bathroom simultaneously. For instance, carry ons for kids, have in there snacks, device, headphones, and a change of clothes. Empty water bottles once you get through that you could fill once you get through security, and zip black bags because things get wet and messy. You know, one anchor event per day you are a fan of this, Yes, I think my husband would put in like four per day if I left it up to him. I'm like maximum of one and maybe a day in there with none like one day in the middle of all the days where you just like or your anchor event is like something very lazy, like see a movie. Well, because the up I mean when we say anchor events, that means a thing that you know you're going to do during that day, right, like you figured out the logistics for that thing and the reason to have that of course, is then you know you're gonna do something like you're not wasting a vacation day. But on the other hand, your day isn't packed so completely full that you are racing from thing to thing. And if you find yourself in like some really cute town that's got a gorgeous festival going on, you're like, no, no, no, we must pay at this place in six minutes. There will be no enjoying this small town festival. I also think that, like a lot of times when we go on vacation, we start off so tired that we just we just can't pack in it's on, or we won't have fun and the kids will get cranky. I mean, maybe this will change as our kids are older. But as much as people like to say, oh, a trip with kids is not a vacation, it's a trip. I wanted to have some vacation like elements and if I'm trying to do like crazy amounts of stuff, even if it's in another country where I know, like, yes, the chance to see Xyz is limited, but I'd rather really enjoy the things that we do see and go on one hike. I follow a blogger that like when they travel I'm always like, oh my god, like I'm so tired just looking at this. I don't know. I mean, I work out, It's not like I have like poor stamina, but I wouldn't want to go to like five different sites in a day. I sometimes do that, but I still think like the one anchor event a day is good. In general. It's a nice balance between you know, vacation spontaneity, but also vacation knowing you're going to have something that you're gonna do. Identify parks or playgrounds near where you are staying. This is really good for blowing off steam or walking with a toddler who is up early. Helpful to know where those are. If you have people who are not necessarily going to eat everything in your party, which many people do if they have young kids. We found that Italian restaurants are often a good bet because you can often convince them to give you plain noodles as a dish, and then the other people can order normal food as one does in a restaurant. But you found that even like Asian fusion, you can do that right like, yeah, no, I was you know something that pizza. I will always make my family happy. A burger type brewery will always make my family happy. And then like some kind of like sushi or Asian fusion type place will always make everybody happy because you can always my kids do like sushi. But also there's always plain old rice, which no one can really complain about too much. So your picky eater can get plain rice and the rest of you can order again real food or I love your next option. Yes, no, this next option is like we do this all the time, and the kids know ice cream for lunch. Yep. So especially when you like if you're staying in a B and B or something and you have like a nice breakfast, like you don't feel like you need like a whole meal. But going all the way, especially like asking your kids to go all the way from like nine am till five or six pm is a lot of hours. So we find that the perfect interlude is stopping at a cute little ice cream shop and having ice cream for lunch. It's usually I mean, I say, like health wise, it's probably not that much worse than anything else. You need a restaurant, and the kids love it. No one's complaining about it. It's very cost effective, and it's usually like just enough to like get you through the day. So we do that frequently on vacation. Yeah, museums can be challenging. One idea that I've done at our local museum with Ruth is to have some sort of scavenger hunt. So in this case, we had to take thirty pictures of thirty depictions of flowers, and so it was a reason to look at stuff for about an hour before there was any complaining. You got to set your expectations at a certain level, like the kid is not going to want to spend all day at the louver unfortunately, even though you might want to. But you might be able to get yourself sixty to ninety minutes and see the highlights if you have some sort of quest for them to do. I've done this similar thing on hikes, where like I'll give them my phone and be like, take some very artistic pictures of nature, and then they come up with very silly things and you get time to walk and nobody's complaining. Yeah, we wanted to share a few tips from our Patreon page. We want to do these anonymously because people may not have meant to have their tips shared with their names on it or anything. On the blog, on the podcast, but just a couple to remind people of these sorts of good ideas. One is, for older kids, have them pack their own backpack for the trip. You obviously can supervise, like to make sure that they haven't put a giant bottle of shampoo if you're only bringing carry ons, for instance, but saying everything has to go in the backpack and you can't, you know, have extra stuff can help limit what they do. You want to keep going. Sure, I like this tip. I haven't done it for a while, but bring grandparents. They said they frequently travel with their mother and it's a nice way to spend time with them and she gets an interesting trip while they do all the planning. Plus there's an additional adult to take the top or out of the restaurant or get up with a jet lag baby, so consider that. Yeah. Another idea is that if you are going to be jet lagged, do the more relaxing part of your trip first. So if you are doing a you know, see all the museums in a city part of a trip, and a you know, just tour around the countryside part of the trip, do the tour around the country side part first. Or if you're going beach and amusement park, I don't know, you could do the beach part first, although maybe you just want to do the amusement park and tire your kids out so that that works as well. Another one is to not be afraid of solo travel with one kid, even if the kid is relatively young, because if it is a one on one trip, it is a lot easier than even if you have two parents but lots of kids. So you might even consider doing international trips with one child. I think over the age of five again, but one parent can handle one child in a way that you know even two parents might have a harder time. Hand three headphone splitter, I agree with that. That's such an easy thing to have on hand. That could solve a lot of battles, and they'll just be so happy you have it in their cheap and available Bribery is another tip that you can relax the rules to encourage good behavior on trips, because a kid might be marginally more likely to behave at a museum if they know they are getting ice cream for lunch, So that's something you can hold out there as an idea. Oh and I love this last one. Rather than souvenirs. Encourage kids to look for something specific, like a Christmas ornament that could commemorate the trip, cool museum postcards that you could then frame at home. But it's a great way to keep a reminder of the adventure without cramming bags full of junk. And then it allows the kids to channel that impulse that they want to buy something into something that you might use, as opposed to the vast majority of stuff that you were not. I also like this person's an end of day contest to get how many steps we took. I just think that's cute. That's cute, and many times it's a lot. That is one of the upsides of family travel. All right, Well, let's go to our question for the week. Sarah, why don't you address this because you have more go ahead. Yeah, this may be an immediate reality as soon reality for both of us, So well hoping all right, So, so so I'm hoping you can talk about moving with kids. My husband and I just purchased our first home. It's also our first time moving with our two year old. We're moving one town over, so kind of like, well, Laura and I are moving even less than that. But yeah, so not across the country. I'd love to hear about anything you've learned to make the moving with kids process more efficient and less stressful for everyone. How do you make time for packing? Do you outsource everything? We need all the advice we can get, so I'm hoping, yes, this should err before they're moved, so that's helpful. We have outsourced as much as possible in the past. Full disclosure, we had some moves paid for by work, because sometimes that's a kerk when you start a new job. But I think we will shell out for some of the same things, like having somebody else pack you up and having I don't think we paid for the like the unpacking. I believe we did the unpacking, but they did all of the packing, like I don't remember. I think we did, like our few valuables and everything else. They just came in and it was like amazing on the truck. I do think decluttering as much as you can so you don't move stuff you don't want is helpful. Do not have it in your brain that you're gonna like put your feet up in a picture perfect palace on day two, like maybe Laura will, because she spent a lot of time working on this new house, but I know that we won't. It takes a while to really move in somewhere fully and have your stuff where you want it, and it may take some trial and error. I do think if you can send your kids away for a bit, to a family member, to a kind friend, set up an exchange of kids, whatever you have to do, because having it out of the way is helpful. Maybe one of the first things you do in the new place be set up your TV and play area so the kids can have stuff to do while you unpack everything else. And then finally, I will just say from personal experience, I did a lot of fretting about switching schools mid year. Again your miles Maybury, and I've heard people say, well for my family X, Y and Z, but for us, the younger is easier. The older your kids get, the more attached they are to their classmates and friends, and the less excited they'll be about moving. I think the only exception would be like if your kids at a cut point where the school tends to like maybe you're at a private school literally goes to eighth grade, so like you know, everyone would have moved anyway, then it might not be a big deal, but otherwise I think it's harder for older kids. Yeah, we're about to face this down. I mean, yes, we plan to higher movers. I mean we're driving some of the stuff over because it's only two miles away, but probably we're going to need people to pack it all up and move it over. I've seen that it's helpful to have one box that is like, unpack this first. So it's like anything you kind of actively need in the first twenty four hours needs to be separated out so that you can have access to it in the first twenty four hours. Because obviously, you know, you can go out and buy more toilet paper, but if you already owned toilet paper, like you probably want to have that available to you by the time people are using the new bathrooms. So that's something that you might do. Or pet food. When we moved from New York, like we had our pet food boxed up our fish food, so we have had the fish in a little bowl like at my feet, Like driving from New York, we got here and like, where's the fish food? So are hunting around for that. But yeah, we had boxes for a long time. I mean it just was a you know, a matter of weeks before they were put away as opposed to a matter of days. And so if you can just sort of steal yourself for that, because you are not going to magically have more time or more energy just because you moved like and so if you can just acknowledge that, then you'll probably be happier. So we'll put that out there, all right, So our love of the week, Sarah, What's what's your love of the week this week? Oh? I'm going to go with my made well perfect vintage jeans because I order them, I like them, and I feel slightly more in style now that skinny jeans are not cool anymore, not cool anymore, So I what is or I'm going to say that the Boden catalog. My daughter picked out a bunch of really cute clothes from the Mini Boden thing and it's fun to buy, you know, cute clothes for a girl who's still into cute stuff. I'm sure that will change in the next year or two and there will be all sorts of stuff that I won't want her to be wearing, but for now, she likes the cute little girls the stuff, so it was fun to order some sweater dresses and leggings and cute pajamas. So big fan of that catalog. All right, well, this has been best of both worlds that we've been talking our five year travel plan and how to move with young kids. We will be back next week with more on making work and life fit together. Thanks for listening. You can find me Sarah at the shoebox dot com or at the Underscore Shoebox on Instagram, and you can find me Laura at Laura vandercam dot com. This has been the best of both worlds podcasts. Please join us next time for more on making work and life work together.