Starting Over Again

This has been a year of saying goodbye and beginning life in another new place.

After leaving Armenia, we spent the past three years in Germany, the longest our family has lived anywhere together. We added another baby boy to our crew (who’s now old enough to insist he isn’t a baby anymore, and he’s right), bonded in our apartment during COVID lockdown, and suddenly, it seemed, it was time to leave again. We moved from Germany to Lithuania.

We’re starting over again.

Part of me loves the excitement of a new place, and part of me is exhausted dealing with learning everything over again. I want to recognize street names or be able to read through a menu without using Google Translate. Just trying to figure out the best brand of groceries to get at the store wears me out!

We all have days when we feel raw from the shock of a new school, new community, and new country. We want to talk to someone who already knows us well, instead of working on making friends. We crave the familiar, the easy, something we don’t have to think too hard about.

So we try to keep our daily routine—mealtimes, chores, bedtimes, screen time limits—as steady as possible. It’s a small way we help keep our home feeling like a safe space in the midst of transition.

We took a short trip last week and while we had fun traveling, it was such a relief to come home and cook our own food and sleep in our own beds.

Routine grounds us. The changing seasons always remind me of that truth. When the leaves turn fire-bright I know cold weather is coming. While I don’t love that autumn brings the sunset earlier each day, it also brings the Christmas season, and after that, the days will grow longer again. That knowledge that reassures me, even as everything else feels different.

We may not have life in Lithuania figured out yet, but the family routines we’ve carried over help us feel a little more settled here.