It all began one frigid evening in January. We had some good friends over for supper and got to talking about their plans to move to Azerbaijan in order to take advantage of the favorable exchange rate; one parent working remotely part-time could support their family! Hey, wait a minute, Matt works remotely part-time! Just like that, gears were turning.

A little bit of background: We had always intended to raise our children ourselves, but a series of events resulted in sending our children to full-time daycare when my maternity leave ended this past fall. We found a lovely stay-at-home-mom with a 3-year-old daughter that does an awesome job with the kids, but we just weren't happy to be spending so little time with our children. We have always wanted to live in Russia someday, so suddenly we realized this might be the perfect chance for us to slow life down and live our dreams!

Our focus was on any Russian-speaking country. Ukraine had the most favorable exchange rate (seriously, we could live like royalty on $1200 USD a month), but the visa requirements were challenging. On a tourist visa, one could only be in the country for 90 out of any 180 day period. With two small children, I really wasn't interested in moving every 3 months to satisfy visa requirements. I like adventure, but it had to be realistic. Russia, although quite a bit more expensive, offers Americans 3-year multiple-entry tourist visas, with the only requirement that one must leave the country for 24 hours every 6 months. Now THAT was something we could handle. But would we be able to support ourselves? I guess we'll find out! But seriously, thanks to the World Wide Web, we were able to find what we hope are legitimate numbers to estimate our cost of living.

Once we decided we were comfortable with our financial estimates, we thought it might be wise to chat with some close friends that had lived in the Baltic States for a number of years, just to make sure we weren't missing anything. We were, of course, and they perhaps think we're a bit crazy, but we weren't going to let that stop us.

Our next step was to get in touch with the workers in Russia and find out if we would be welcomed and helpful. Also, we didn't have any specific location requirements so we wanted to get some insight as to where we might be most useful. It didn't take long to receive word that Novosibirsk would be the perfect spot for us, and we thought it suited us just fine; a climate harsher than Duluth? Sure! Why not?! Who wouldn't want to live in the middle of Siberia?!

We've set our sights on leaving around September 1st, give or take a month. There is much to be done between now and then! Our visas should be good for 3 years, so we'll take it day by day, and plan on landing stateside no later than the summer of 2021, right before Finn starts school. I've successfully negotiated for a trip home every summer, which also helped when breaking the news to the grandparents. I have a growing list of things I'm looking forward to and what I'm dreading that you can look forward to reading about in another post.