The best way to achieve your dreams is to dissect and dispel your excuses why you aren’t achieving them now. Or so an article I read somewhere a long time ago said… In that spirit, I thought I’d go through and dissect the excuses we have for not dropping everything and hitting the road.

Family

We have the most amazing family base I could ever imagine. My husband was born and bred in Saint Louis to a Mother who herself was born and bred here. His entire world was and is in this place. We bought a house a block away from my in laws because well…we fell for the house but ALSO because we love our family. They have been our child care, our emergency calls and our crowdfunders for the last few years and we would be lost without them. I think I won the mother-in-law lottery with his mom and people joke all the time about how alike we can be. Although, he won that lottery too because my family is pretty much the bees knees. We are scattered between here an the east coast. But not for long…My parents are moving back to the Lou soon and now my Sister and her family may be moving closer. (YAY) With all this family around, how could we just get up and leave them all? Add in our tiny group of dearest friends and could we handle life on our own for such a long time without all these important people close by? I really don’t know.

Then there is our church family and our AMAZING life group. We searched long and hard for a church that fed us the gospel in the way we needed and in turn guides us to live , work and play that gospel while sharing it with others. This is something that we would miss greatly being on the road. The relationships that we have found there…between our kids attending Sunday school and preschool there, Jeremy working for a stint in the office and our family mission trip, are worth keeping us here alone. And THEN there’s our amazing life group.  We get together a few times a month to fellowship and study together and we would be heart broken to leave our Brew Crew. The connection, support and accountability our group provides each other is pretty irreplaceable.

School/Speech

Lorelei is just starting preschool and Oliver will be in Kindergarten next fall. We struggled outrageously to figure out how to keep the kids in a Christian environment at school. We were pretty on the fence about this when they were little but after watching Oliver the first year of preschool get so grounded in his faith was incredible. The love that his teacher showed him was unparalleled to anything he could have gotten at a public school and from that point on I think it was just a matter of how can we afford it and not if.

Then there’s speech therapy. Both my kids, especially Oliver, have had speech delays and have needed intervention. We found the Walker-Scottish Rite Clinic and it has made SUCH a difference in our lives. How could we pull them out of this and school to go on the road? I think about this a lot and how I can’t imagine ever being able to teach them as well as the people that have brought them so far. I mean, we had go to speech because I wasn’t good enough at helping them learn and I don’t think that’s changed.

Jobs

This is simple…Neither of us have jobs that travel. I work retail so I can pretty much do that anywhere but my current position allows me to just work nights and weekends and ultimately pick up whatever shifts I want. I can work as little as I want or as much as they let me. This has been an incredible help to our family and I would never be able to find that flexibility again.

The hubs, on the other hand, works full time and is the core financial key to our livelihood. Our insurance is through him and without his job we wouldn’t be able to survive. We already barely make enough to float so if you took our jobs away we would be drowning. which brings us to our biggest holdback…

Debt

We are drowning in it! It feels never ending and despite it being a goal to get out since we married in 2011, we just can’t seem to get there. We bought our first house a few years ago which meant we had to pay off a HUGE portion and then a few years later we were right back where we were. They say this is the hardest habit to break and we are walking proof of it. Part of it is being creatures of habit that love to shop and part is because we just don’t make enough money to keep us from needing to use the car. We spend more than we make and just can’t get to the point where we don’t need to charge something every month. This is by FAR the biggest thing holding us back. Without our debt, we could save up, buy the trailer and SUV we want and not worry about all the piles of bills we owe. We would make enough to live without adding to our debt and be a little comfortable. This will be our BIGGEST challenge to our dreams. Not just the travel dreams but any family dreams we have for the future.

So, now that we’ve dissected our biggest “Why Not” factors it’s time to dispel these excuses and make a plan to elimintate the problems that can’t be logic-ed away. This is clearly going to need it’s own post. Til then…thanks for reading. 😉