Destination Paradise

I have to admit that I prepared for this to be a difficult Christmas. Obviously after spending 4 Christmases apart from Carlos, I had to be excited to finally spend our FIRST Christmas as a married couple and our first Christmas as a family of three. Obviously those things were a big deal but as Christmas approached, they kept getting overshadowed by sadness of all that we'd be missing. See, I am from a large, lively, mostly Italian-American family (mom's side), virtually all of which lives in Chicago, and except for one year with my Guatemalan family in New York, I have never in my 29 years spent a Christmas without them!! This means that Christmas has always involved multiple family events, piles of Italian beef, Italian sausage, mostaccioli, multiple pies, multiple Christmas trees, Christmas movies playing loudly on TVs all over the house, louder relatives having a good time, AND real cannoli to top it all off. Then let's add the fact that Carlos is from a Mexican ...

While being away from the rest of the family and the comforting traditions on Thanksgiving can be so depressing, there are some benefits. One big one is that we can be totally flexible with how we celebrate and what traditions we carry on/invent. So, our original Thanksgiving Day plan was to make our first trip to Costco for some essentials, and then cook dinner and have our own little Thanksgiving here in Korea. But the moment we set foot in Costco, we knew it was going to be no small trip. We ended up spending hours in there, and since Lucas was doing fine relaxing in the cart with an iPad, we decided to just skip the plans for dinner and instead do our Thanksgiving Dinner on Friday. Thus, our Thanksgiving meal was actually McDonald's, another rare delicacy from home.  This means we were able to stock up on so many awesome and exciting things: cheese, sausage, AVOCADOES!, oatmeal, plus our Thanksgiving dessert. Costco is fun because all of the expats wander the store with...

Here is about 3 months' worth of video footage and possibly some previously unseen photos related to our new life in Korea. I finally strung them all together thanks to the wonders of iMovie. It's a bit on the long side, but hopefully it will give you a bit more of a taste of our life here. Everything here was shot either on an iPod, an iPad, or MacBook iSight camera (and a few random LG dumbphone camera shots, too).  So it’s pretty unprofessional, but I think it tells the story pretty decently. :) Glad we’ve finally reached this stop on our journey.

My list of ways to survive unwanted separation has been sitting there begging to be taken up again, so here we go, I'm jumping right to one of my favorites. Coping Strategy #4: Choose joy. Choose victory. Choose to believe the miracle. This one actually took me a really long time to figure out, unfortunately. But apparently if you live every day feeling that life is awful, the world is out to get you, God has forgotten you, and things will never improve, you really start to believe it, and you get even more miserable! A friend of mine recently updated her Facebook status to say, "Choose joy." I thought that was remarkable because it's simple but so true. When everything around seems bleak, you really have to be intentional about living positively. Some days, this means pushing out thoughts of: "My husband's having a horrible day, I'm a whole country away, my son is sick, the Skype connection is too choppy to talk, and I had an awful day at wor...