This week marks our one year anniversary of arriving in Barbados. We arrived with a 3.5 month old baby, a whole lot of luggage, and even more uncertainty about what this new life would bring. A year later, we have a 15.5 month old toddler (can I please still call him baby?!) who is definitely starting to show flickers of personality and independence; hopefully we have a lot less stuff than we came with because we used it up (although we do need to purge more); and the uncertainty seems far less daunting when you've done this even once. To echo Oprah, "what we know for sure" is that this life is the right choice for us. While Barbados may not have been high on our list of places we hoped to experience in this career, we are not only very thankful that it was chosen for us, we are most definitely maximizing our time here.
These are a few of my favorite things about living here, in a sort of stream of consciousness type list: beaches, spending the day on a catamaran, rum punch, fresh coconuts and coconut water sold roadside every weekend for US$1, beachfront restaurants, the Haagen-Dazs ice cream shoppe, walks on the beach with my little family before/after visiting said ice cream shoppe, the weather (I could go on about the weather for pages, but I will spare you), the house we have been assigned, the little fountain that turns on in the little pond behind our house, the sky as I look out of our bathroom window every morning (it never looks the same), waking up with sunlight every day of the year, those colleagues who I'm fortunate enough to call friends... I could go on, but this is what comes to mind immediately.
I now share with you what my BFF NW wrote in an email just this week, because it captures so well the essence of our life here: "Hearing you talk about soaking in your last year in Barbados makes me smile. Your life sounds so hectic (to me), with all the travel, but ... it seems, because it's so impermanent, it's really making you slow down." I could not have said it better.
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