The Naks are Moving

As you may know, the Naks are headed for Shanghai, China!  While it's a BIG move, the timing was right for our family to step outside our comfort zone, avoid our complacency, and challenge ourselves with a new adventure.  After years of wishing to spend time abroad, factors came together which included Kara leaving her job, Ben finding a good spot in Shanghai to teach secondary math, and a great sellers' market for our house.  We will obviously miss many things here in Saint Paul and America, namely family and friends, but we are excited to see what our fresh opportunity will bring.  It is only a two year commitment and we plan on being back in a blink of the eye.

In selling our house, we have done a gigantic purge and have been working fairly hard to get things ready.  We've come across many funny items, including Kara's underwater disposable camera from 2004.  It still worked, but Ben and the girls struggled to get any good pictures when they had the pool to themselves earlier in the week.

 

We've been saying a fair amount of goodbyes and we're lucky to have so many fun friends and family to bid farewell.  Thank you.  This last week has included many families with young boys and the girls have adapted well.  They were excited to play soccer and arm wrestle the Ottavianis and they were amazed that the Berlands had enough people to play a game of baseball together.  Both days have concluded with Pip announcing that they were the "best day ever."

In local news, the entire family was pumped to go to a mini-concert featuring a family favorite, Jeremy Messersmith.  The girls know almost every word to his new ukulele album entitled "11 obscenely optimistic songs" and it was cute to see them sing along at the show.  They got to say 'hi' to Jeremy and he was impressed by their expansive knowledge of his repertoire.  The girls have been playing a lot of school with their dolls and have been watching the late 90s cartoon show "Recess" as much as they're allowed.  They also currently love to say "jinx" (and "jinx again") to each other.