They Thought We Were Getting a Dog

It was January 2021, 10 months into COVID. We sat down at the dinning room table for a family meeting with three pieces of paper. I get now how this could have been misleading.

You see, everyone and I mean everyone, was getting a new puppy during COVID. It seemed like every week a new family at church, from school, or on Facebook was posting and talking about their dog. Our kids have asked for a dog for years, multiple times. But we are too busy to give a dog, let alone a puppy, the time and attention they need and deserve.

But it never occurred to us that is exactly what our kids thought this family meeting was about.

Chuck went first, sharing that he was going to be done teaching after this school year. We thought it was important that the kids were the first to know and we trusted them to understand the sequence of timing on an important decision like this. Kate, our youngest, would be in 4th grade next year and had looked forward to being with Dad.

They took it in stride waiting for the .... AND

Then we shared about the possibility of taking next school year and traveling the lower 48 states in the RV together learning and working together on an adventure!

This is NOT what the kids thought we were meeting about. They had names, breeds, ideas for chore division...

Instead, we explained that the three sheets of papers were for brainstorming "Pros", "Cons" and "Must Haves" of doing this adventure.

After about 10 minutes of mourning the idea that we were not getting a dog. We rolled into a great conversation and began writing things on the lists. Two hours later we had started to wrap our heads around what an adventure like this for our family would look like.

Then we gave everyone two weeks to:

- Think about the idea

- Talk to trusted friends and family

- Add to the lists

- Decide on a scale of 1 (never going) to 10 (lets leave tomorrow) where each person was

Two weeks later, everyone was at least a "5" which meant we moved forward with praying, planning, and imaging what this 9-month adventure would be like.

We invite you to join us on the road through this website.