I’m taking part in a Foreign Service blogger round-up this week. The prompts are:

–Tell us about what you’re doing to stay happy at Post, even when everything from housing to R&R to your spouse’s work schedule seems to be going wrong.

Hm, there have definitely been posts where I could have blogged extensively on this subject! But not Vienna, thank heaven.

–Take or find in your archives a picture from Post that makes you happy just looking at it.

That’s too easy. Any photo from Italy will make me happy, no problem!

–Do something wonderful for yourself and tell us about it, no matter how small.

I’m not so much the “get a pedicure and everything will be right with the world” type. I tend to think bigger. 🙂

Now that my youngest is old enough to feed and clothe himself unsupervised, I am very much enjoying traveling. Just dropping everything and hitting the road. You know, like my husband has been able to do for the last twenty years or so thanks to business trips and his ever-reliable wife. Now it’s my turn!

Last spring I stayed in the States after my daughter’s college graduation, visiting family and friends. I treated her to a spa weekend at the Biltmore on the way to visit family in Nashville. I lived out of a suitcase for a month, getting away from all the household routines and the endless emails from my son’s high school. All I had to do was a bit of work on my laptop now and then. It was wonderful.

In October, I grabbed my bag and joined my husband in Warsaw for a business trip. Which was a good plan, considering we ended up getting posted there for 2015!

Then, in November, I went to visit my daughter for a week in Tuscany, as she wrapped up an internship at a museum. Just up and went! It was awesome.

In December, while my husband was on one of his many, many TDYs, we up and went to Prague for a couple of nights for the Christmas markets. Because why not?

A couple of weeks ago, I joined my husband on another business trip, to Brussels. I love being able to do this! I fully intend to continue taking advantage of these opportunities when we get to Warsaw, along with solo trips on occasion (most likely to warmer climes!)

We had our kids on the young side, which was just as well, since we didn’t have the resources to do a lot of traveling anyway. I loved being a stay at home Mom for all those years, but I also feel ready to move on—without looking back. I have just about worked myself out of a job, which is as it should be!

The wonderful thing I am doing for my kids is to love them enough to boot them out of the nest.

The wonderful thing I am doing for myself is to embrace and enjoy this new, and possibly fleeting, life stage. Which is (at least mostly) about ME.