To be continued...

We made it safely back to Brussels this week...hooray!! The trip itself was very uneventful, thankfully! Autumn was seriously a perfect angel...slept at all the appropriate times, played well in the down times, ate pretty well...I couldn't have asked for a better travel companion...Jacob did pretty well too...hehe! And everything fit into our suitcases...another hurdle I was quite worried about as I had been shopping for the past month trying to stock up on everything. But we're here...we're home safe and sound. Everything was exactly as we left it...except for the fact that it was FREEZING...both indoors and out! We were instructed to turn the heat off before we left and since it has been hovering in the teens and twenties you can only imagine how cold it was in our apartment with the big old windows. We immediately ran around turning all the radiators on and finally after about a day and a half it was bearable in here.

And the day after we arrived we got another addition to the cold...SNOW!! Beautiful big white flakes! It only ended up being about an inch and a half, but enough to send the whole city into a traffic jam! The view out our window was quite a mess!

Glad we were all home at this point...even Jacob.

But now that we are here we can't help but question...for how long? We received the news the Friday before our departure that Jacob's company had been sold to Eastman Chemical Company. (Here is an article about the purchase if you are interested.) Eastman is headquartered in Kingsport, Tennessee and it quickly became evident that Solutia's St. Louis headquarters will cease to exist in the next year or two. That throws quite a wrench in to our plans to return to St. Louis in the next year and a half when our Brussels adventure is complete. Luckily the deal between the two companies will not close for another 5-6 months so we feel relatively safe until then, but what comes next we just don't know. We would like to be back in St. Louis at some point...so it may mean leaving our Brussels adventure soon (while Solutia still exists and can honor their commitment to move us home)...but that would likely mean Jacob would have only a short time to find another job before he's turned lose and Solutia's offices are closed for good. There is a possibility of a job in Kingsport, but is that the right move for our family? Do we want to be back in the US, but still be 10 hours away from family and friends? It's not ideal, but it may be the best choice. And with either scenario, how much more time do we have in Europe? We really don't know. We're hopeful we at least get the next 5 or 6 months, but feel somewhat certain that it will likely not be much more than that. We're hoping to get some more answers soon, but for now we're planning our next European adventures...and hoping to get as much traveling in over the next few months as we possibly can...in case our time here is cut short. Right now our travel wish list consists of Rome, Tuscany, Amsterdam, Switzerland, Southern France, Greece, Berlin, Prague, Copenhagen, Norway, Turkey, London, Scotland, Spain, Ireland...and probably a few more I forgot (I know some are just countries and some are much more specific because we haven't figured out exactly where we want to go). Think we can pull it off with only half a year or so? We shall see.

I guess all we can say for sure at this point is this story is to be continued...