We ended up leaving Alaska a lot sooner than expected. No surprise, you think? I am not that surprised either, looking back. The time was ripe for change.
I found out I was pregnant at the end of July. I wasn’t even four weeks along.
I think it took me about two days of being pregnant to really grasp the reality—we were seemingly a million miles away from home and I was going to have a baby. A long, cold, dark Alaskan winter awaited us, Ben still hadn’t found a job in Alaska and my family wasn’t anywhere near us. Was I really going to have a baby in April, alone, without family? With the Covid restrictions in Alaska everything was that much more challenging. I wrote about it in my last entry way back in July—and nothing changed in August. My work was still basically prohibiting us to leave the state. Leave, and you cant come back to work until you have 3 negative tests, each one spaced apart several days. WHAT?
Fast forward a couple of weeks and when week 5-6 of my pregnancy arrived, I was so sick I had to start calling out of work. There was no way I could make it through a single day. A few shifts turned into more and more. Before I knew it, I was three more weeks into my pregnancy and I hadn’t been to work. We needed a backup plan. Ben had been furiously applying to jobs all over the United States. At that point I just felt, Come what may. We were desperate and were leaving all options on the table. I was terrified I wouldn’t be able to return to work for weeks. And who was going to provide for us?
In early September, still sick, I was overjoyed when Ben got a job offer in Golden, Colorado. I think we had two weeks to pack up our lives and move. Thankfully, Bens parents flew out to Alaska and helped us pack and get everything together. I was still pretty sick, but that was the week I slowly began to feel better. We had to sell some stuff to make it all fit into trailers, and I prayed daily that I was going to be able to drive my Rav4 and pull one of those trailers 3000+ miles. I knew I had to if we wanted to get out of Alaska before winter arrived. And I wanted to get out of Alaska before winter arrived.
The day we left for Alaska, just as we were about to walk out the door of our Alaskan home for the last time, I puked several times. And then we set off for a grueling, miserable, insert whatever adjective you want to, 8-day drive across Canada and the US to get back to Colorado.
Stay tuned for that summary.
| jenn at home | 