Day 127 - Rainy Day, Big Dreams and Building Our Travel Website

Another bit of a sleep in this morning, I think we were up around 6:30. Kia started the day with a meditation while I jumped straight into catching up on the website. I’ve fallen about a week behind on uploading the daily journals, and once you slip behind, it takes a fair bit of effort to catch back up. So that’s the mission over the next few days, just chip away at it and get back on top.

Emmett eventually came in around 8, and it turns out he and Maddie had already been up for a while, sitting in their room drawing. They’ve started designing what they want our future home to look like when we get back. Safe to say, they’ve set the bar pretty high. They both want to live on a farm. Maddie wants a quad bike, Emmett wants a motorbike. They want horses, cows, sheep, goats, chickens, ducks, and even a motorbike track. There needs to be space for Kia to run her kinesiology clinic, and the house itself is a full setup. Two storeys, with the entire upstairs belonging to them. Kia and I are allowed a room downstairs. Then there’s multiple playrooms, a room for Lulu, a study, and a full classroom setup so Kia can homeschool them properly, complete with a teacher’s desk at the front like an American classroom.

They’d both drawn out incredibly detailed plans across multiple pages and were so excited to walk us through every part of it. It was honestly pretty cool to see how creative they’d been and how much thought they’d put into it.

After that, we all headed downstairs for coffees. Maddie was pretty firm on not running today, so Kia and Emmett stuck to their routine and headed out for their run. I told Kia I’d head out once they got back, and Maddie stayed behind, happily in her room continuing her creative projects, designing and making up her own little games.

I stayed on the website for a bit longer, starting to build out some new pages. I’m trying to get it to a point where it becomes more maintenance than heavy setup, but there’s still a lot of background work involved. Adding depth, building credibility, showing that we’ve travelled before and know what we’re doing. It’s slow going, but it’s coming together.

Once Kia and Emmett got back, we swapped over and I headed out for my run. I pushed through a solid 5K, trying to hold a strong tempo, but the rain from the night before had left puddles everywhere. There were a few moments of stepping stone-style running to avoid soaking my shoes, which broke the rhythm a bit, but overall it was still a good run. It was overcast, no wind, nice and cool. Pretty ideal running conditions apart from the puddles.

When I got back, Maddie had just finished making banana pancakes, and Emmett was in the middle of making his. Kia jumped in and made hers as well while I ducked out to grab some bread rolls for my breakfast and lunch for the kids and me. Once I got back, I made myself some breakfast while Kia started organising the schoolwork for the day. We sat and chatted while I ate, just talking through a few bits and pieces.

I headed back upstairs to keep working on the site while the kids got stuck into school. From upstairs I could hear multiplication tables being fired off, working through it all step by step. Eventually I came down around lunchtime, and Kia and Emmett were just wrapping up his schoolwork. We swapped again so Kia could head upstairs and do some research while I hung with the kids.

We did a few brain games and then got stuck into a run of Monopoly Deal. Emmett won one, Maddie won one, I won one, and then Emmett took out the final game. Pretty even contest and a good bit of fun.

The weather stayed pretty average all afternoon. Rain hanging around, nothing really open, and no real point heading out anywhere. So after a solid morning of creativity and schoolwork, we let the kids settle in for a movie, which I was more than happy to join.

I got dinner going while we watched, pasta again. Feels like a staple at the moment, but I guess that’s part of being in Italy. We ate, relaxed, and slowly wound the day down. By around 7:30 the kids were in bed, which was a good result.

Kia and I finished the night chatting through more trip plans. We’ve also been trying to dig up some old videos from past trips that Kia edited years ago. The idea is to upload them to the website for different locations, just to add more depth and history to what we’re building.

All in all, a pretty indoorsy day with the weather, but still one of those days where it feels like we’re moving forward. Getting things done, building something, and just enjoying the slower pace when it comes.