The begininng

So, three years ago, my husband and I decided to drop everything and go to graduate school. We packed up the kids, quit our jobs, and moved to the other side of the mid-west. At that point, I thought we were completely nuts (as I suspect most of our friends and family did as well). Would it be possible to support a family of four on the income of two graduate students?!? The answer, as it turns out, was yes. We’ve managed to get by, and honestly, the jobs we left weren’t great, financially speaking, so combined with holds on our student loans, and some other cost cutting measures, we didn’t feel too much of a pinch. We’ve all made new friends and rooted ourselves in the life of this mid-west college town.

The hitch? We’ve known from the beginning that this move was only temporary. Although, I still have YEARS left to go on my PhD in French, my husband finished his MFA this spring. The plan three years ago, heck, the plan until three months ago, was that at this point, the four of us would head off for a year in France while I taught English through an exchange program run by the university. Although we had survived three years of grad school on our meager salaries, we realized that one part-time salary might not be enough to support four people in France. Combine that will my husband’s eagerness to re-start his career and my son’s reluctance to attend a French school, and our trip for four turned into a trip for two, my fourteen year old daughter and I.

Although, this is not the beginning of our dreaming, nor the beginning of our preparation, nor even the beginning of our travels, this is the beginning of the chronicle of our year in southwest France.