Hubby and I met at work in our native Finland in 2014. While it wasn’t exactly love at first sight, we made quick work of the relationship milestones: he moved in within weeks of our first date in September 2014, we eloped (if that’s a term anyone uses anymore) in July 2015, and had our kids in November 2015 and August 2017. In ten years, we’ve crossed a bunch of bucket list items off our list: we’ve renovated one house from top to bottom and a couple of additional kitchens and bathrooms for practice; got a master’s degree (hubby) and PhD (me) as well as our teaching qualifications; have been on research visits to Australia and Spain; and adopted a fur baby. And we’re showing no signs of slowing down!

Currently, we’re experimenting with expat life. We will first spend 6 months in Portugal and in autumn 2024, we’re moving to Spain for a year. Both gigs are grant-funded research visits with hubby working fully remotely and the kids are homeschooled in the Portugal part of the journey and will attend an international school in Spain.

The reason I started applying for grants for research visits abroad stems from one afternoon in November 2022, when I arrived home from work a bit earlier than normally with a great idea. Hubby was working from home and greeted my starry-eyed enthusiasm with some wariness.

“Hubby,” I said, “we should go on a round-the-world trip!”

Because I know him well, I could see various responses from “that’s so far away from making my bucket list it’s more likely I’ll turn vegetarian” to “woman, do you think we’re made of money?” on his face. But because he’s a smart man, he asked instead: “what are your reasons for wanting to do that?” which was, of course, exactly the right question. While I do love travelling I didn’t necessarily want to spend a year traipsing around the globe. But I did want something.

Now, we didn’t have time to go into the reasons there and then – there were kids to be picked up, dinner to cook, homework to cry about. But later, we had the Great Strategy Session of Pancho Villa (Pancho Villa being a Finnish restaurant chain that would make for an unlikely place for a family strategy session if it wasn’t for the fact that they have large booths with massive tables, perfect for sticking post-its to) where we mapped out What We Want from Life. Happily for our marriage, our respective post-it notes showed remarkable agreement. We both thought that we were too busy in our current life to do things we actually enjoy; we felt we had to work harder and try to make more money just to stay afloat; and we were both ready for a big change.

And so living somewhere where it’s possible to go barefoot most of the year became a bucket list item that we’ve been chasing ever since.

The term bucket list is both an appropriate one and one that doesn’t sit that easily with me. On one hand, it does appear as if we always have a couple of to-dos on our list that guide our major (and more minor) life decisions, such as “visit Iceland” (done) and “become fluent in a new language” (in progress. Spoiler alert: it will not be Portuguese.). But the idea that we’d have a long list of things we want to do and, after we’ve successfully ticked off all items, we’d be ready to kick the bucket isn’t particularly appealing – what if we run out of items far sooner than expected? I also don’t want to hold on too rigidly to list items that are not serving their purpose anymore (after all, we never did make it to Texas to drive a pickup truck).

Why kids and bucket lists? Well, first of all, our kids are kind of hard to ignore. Second, you know the saying “happy wife, happy life”? Turns out, not so much if you have kids. “Happy kids, happy life” is far more like it. Heck, it even feels that “happy dog, happy life” is more true. And in the end, we never wanted to put our lives and bucket lists on hold until the kids have grown up. We’re doing this with them and for them and because we have them. Happy to have you along the ride!