Moving Houses at Eight Months Pregnant

Heyo Family and Friends,

Happy Fourth of July Weekend. We hope you’re enjoying some summertime, relaxation, and spending time with people you love. It was a regular weekend here in the Philippines but we made some final pushes (pun intended) to get settled before baby boy makes his debut. Sending out a quick update on where we’re at before then.

About one month ago, on Monday, 30 May, the movers started packing up our entire house to transport to our new home about 1.5 miles away in the same village. From 01 to 03 June, they moved and unboxed everything. As you know, since we moved into our previous house just under a year ago, we’ve struggled with bug issues and the neighbor dogs barking at all hours of the night, which affected our sleep greatly. With baby on the way and an amazing available house opportunity through friends, we decided to make the move even though Samantha was eight months pregnant at the time. It was a long game move. We’re happy to report at this point, we’re 100% sure we made the right decision and we really love the house (you can see some house pics at the end of this post). The space is great, the huge yard is perfect for the pups and our boys, our sleep is better (albeit still a bit disrupted from our toddler), and we’re feeling extremely grateful for this oasis we get to call home for the next few years.

In some ways, the settling process was much smoother than our initial move to the Philippines. I mean… we had functioning WiFi properly installed at our new house on day one. Pretty impressive. And it didn’t take us a couple months to figure out the trash collection process. In other ways, the move was more frustrating and difficult… Samantha was not able to do much physically and because the house was not properly ready for us to move in to at the start of our lease… we had to essentially live with contractors around the house for an entire month. The work was non-stop, finally ending last week. In addition to coordination and oversight of the contractors, Samantha has been working to organize the house, repurposing furniture as best she can in the new, bigger space, buying used and new as needed, and working to get routines back in place for everyone. Travis has been working his butt off to get work to a point that he can step away when baby arrives, including a work trip to Ireland in June and his search to fill a few key roles in his leadership team. Worldly supply chain issues still affect his work, which means every weeknight includes late calls. On the weekends, we’ve been tackling house projects together and we celebrated our 1-year anniversary of living in the Philippines on 10 June. We’re more than livable in the new place and ready for baby whenever he decides it’s time. Importantly, our guest room is ready for visitors! A huge shoutout to Charity and Margie (our helpers), who have helped immensely during this transition.

In addition to the move, this pregnancy has been much harder than the first. It started quite uncertainly and then proceeded to include just about every ailment you can think of except the two late big ones: high blood pressure and diabetes. Probably the most frustrating and disheartening being the inability to fully play with Merrick in his final weeks as an only child. This has left Samantha thankful for the tender snuggles but ready to be done being pregnant. Overall, baby and Mama are healthy and we’re incredibly excited to meet him and grow our family.

Right now, we’re in a holding pattern until he arrives. Rainy season started at the beginning of June and has been in full swing, bringing on some gnarly thunderstorms… likely soon some typhoons will make an appearance as well. Additionally, there has been a resurgence of COVID cases here and after our 37-week appointment this past weekend, doctor put our family on home lockdown. This means no gatherings, no school, no swim class, more work from home etc. to ensure we remain healthy in the final weeks of this pregnancy. This precaution is to both protect our newborn and to ensure we can be together for his birth… something we’re really hoping for, since we didn’t get to be together when Merrick was born. Send those positive vibes our way, please.

All our love,

xo Team Jansen

Note, we took most of the house pictures in wide angle to show the whole room, which makes the room appear larger than it is.