A BIG Life Update

My blog hasn’t been very active these past few months.

In fact, four months ago, I announced that I’d be taking a semi-break from Wandering Footsteps.  I’d post our summer and fall adventures at a more leisurely pace so that we could focus on family, relaxation and our bus renovations.

That was only half-true.

The full truth is that Bruno and I were turning our focus onto something else – something I wasn’t quite ready to share on the wide world of the web.

Our focus has been on my growing belly.

We are expecting our first baby!!!

Maybe things make a little bit more sense now; why we sold Totoyaya, our beloved 4WD Land Cruiser, and upgraded to a massive bus; why there hasn’t been much action (or travel!) on the blog; and why I have been totally vague about our upcoming travel plans.

Despite the lack of travel-related excitement, it has been an exciting summer and fall for us, as Bruno and I have experienced our own pregnancy for the first time.  Hearing the heartbeat, feeling the baby’s kicks, watching my belly grow – it’s all been pretty magical, indeed.

Those of you hard-core nomads reading this may be wondering why we haven’t been traveling at all during this special time.  We did travel across Canada through our first trimester (check out my posts on the Prairies, the Canadian Wilderness, whale-watching in Quebec, the Gaspe Peninsula, and the Acadian Peninsula), and I can happily report I was feeling, overall, not too bad.  Tired, for sure, but I was still mostly able to enjoy the places we passed.

We did a bit of travel in the second trimester, too – notably our big three RV road trip, and our trip to France.  I even did my girls’ trip to Barcelona, Carcassonne and Bordeaux at the very beginning of my third trimester!  Go me! J

But, for the most part, we haven’t been on the road, in the way Bruno and I usually are.  The reasons are complex and various, but ultimately, we’ve chosen to take this time to be close to family, get really good, consistent pre-natal care, and enjoy nesting (that last one is just me, haha!).

Two weeks ago, we moved into a rental home near Antigonish, Nova Scotia.  We chose the little town of Antigonish because we got the opportunity to work with registered midwives based out of the St. Martha’s Regional Hospital (they didn’t have midwives in New Brunswick when I was looking into our options, though they’ve recently begun serving in Frederiction).  We’re over three hours away from my family, but relative to where we could be (Mexico! France! Thailand!), three hours is pretty darn close!

Our tentative plan for the coming several months is this:

• Spend about four months in this lovely rental home.  Our due date for baby is February 3^rd (coming soon!) so we plan to be here both for our baby’s birth and the first several weeks afterwards (time to get a handle on things!)
• Make visits to both New Brunswick and France in April to show off the newest member of the Caumette/Sears family. Woo hoo!
• By late-May (cross our fingers!) we’d like to hit the road in our Big Blue Bus, baby in tow. We’d like to spend 5-6 months slowly driving down the eastern seaboard of the United States, spending our summer in the Appalachian Mountains.  We’re going to take our time with this trip, as we’ll have the adjustments of life in a bus with a baby to contend with.  Should make for some interesting blog posts!

Well, that’s us!  It’s a pretty big life update, and is going to certainly change our travels, as well as the content of this blog.  In fact, I have no clue how I will feel about blogging after baby arrives, but my hope is that I’ll still make time for it, though most certainly not on the same weekly basis as I once did.

In the meantime, we’re having quite the cultural experience over here in Nova Scotia.  Bruno is embarking on his first winter ever, we’re living in a country-style home heated principally by wood fire, and we’re making a few baby-friendly changes to the bus (think car seat and baby bed).  In other words, plenty of good blogging material!  Stay tuned!