How It All Began!

Lots of people have asked me about how we ended up moving out here to Sweden, so here is a fairly short account of what happened in the last year!!!!

Back in January, I met a lovely man called Alesssandro on the internet. He is Italian and lives in Sweden with his twin sons who are 12. I was very wary at first, having heard lots of horror stories about people who had met weirdos on the internet! But, I also have a friend who met her husband on the internet and they are very happily married now, so although I was very careful, I did take some calculated risks!

We chatted for hours every night on skype and for my birthday in March, he bought us plane tickets to fly out to Sweden for a holiday for 2 weeks at Easter which eneded up being almost 3 weeks because we got 'stranded' due to the volcano!! No complaints from us though!. A few of my friends and family were happy, but most were very concerned as they obviously hadn't met him! I did try to explain that after months of only talking every day, you do get to know people very well, but I can understand why they were concerned.

Anyway, it all went great! We got on better in real life than online and his boys are fab! With my girls being 13, 12 and 9 at the time, the boys slotted in great and they all got on like a house on fire. Alessandro used to be a professional skier and is now a coach, so we also got some free skiing lessons which was fantastic!

The problem we had was where we would go from there, with living so far away from each other, but by the end of the two weeks we had decided that it would be easier for us to move to Sweden as with him and his ex-wife having joint custody of the boys, there was no way that she would allow him to take the boys to England to live, and also, his mother lives with him, so she would need to move too which would be very difficult for her. My house was only just big enough for us, so there was no way we could fit another 4 people in, and he has a lovely big house.

So, the natural step was for us to move out to Sweden. The girls were all in stages of their education where a move wouldn't be a major problem and they were all 100% for moving too. My family weren't however! My Dad wrote me two letters saying that we were doing the wrong thing etc. To be fair to him, he still hadn't met Alessandro, and he also struggles with speaking about emotions, so he looks at the practical side of things! Instead of saying that he would miss us, he was very negative about practical aspects!

Then, at the end of July, Alessandro came over to stay with us for 3 weeks. He met my family, and after 2 days, my Dad said "Why didn't you let us meet Alessandro before you announced you were moving? My reaction would have been completely different" He absolutely loved him and was then 100% behind us going, as were the rest of our family!

So, although I didn't have to have my Dad's permission to move out here, it was so much better knowing that we were going with his blessing and he was fantastic about helping us to get sorted out, and sorting out the rest of my stuff once we had moved out!!!

So, that is a quite story about how we came to be moving out here! I will update with more news of the past 3 1/2 weeks once I have got a bit more time!