We're Here and We Wish You Were Too: Our Adventure Continues

As we sit here in our new home, surrounded by the familiar comforts of life, it's hard to believe that we've been on as many adventures as we have. From the moment we left Denmark 12 years ago, we knew that we were embarking on a journey that would change us forever. We had big dreams and an insatiable appetite for exploration, and we set out to make them a reality. Our kids, Haley and Parker, were just 5 and 3 years old when we left, but they've grown into capable and curious young adults who are now navigating their own lives in this crazy world.

One of the things that's always amazed us about our adventures is how beautiful it all is. We fell deeply in love with Morocco, where we spent 10 incredible months living among the locals and learning about their customs and traditions. The food, the people, the music - everything about it was so captivating that we felt like we'd found a little slice of paradise. And when it came time to leave, there were tears in our eyes because we knew we were leaving behind not just a country, but a way of life.

But life had other plans for us. After Morocco, we spent several years traveling and working remotely, taking on new adventures and making new friends along the way. We started businesses, built online communities, and created content that inspired others to follow their dreams. And through it all, our kids grew up with a sense of wonder and curiosity that's hard to find in today's fast-paced world.

Eventually, we knew that it was time to make a decision about where to settle down next. But there were some tough choices to be made. We realized that living in Denmark again wouldn't be possible for us - the cost of living was too high, and we worried about being sent back to another country that might not be as welcoming to us. So when it came time to move on, we decided to head back to the United States, where our kids would have a chance to grow up with more freedom and opportunities.

But even though we're settled in one place now, we know that adventure is always just around the corner. Our kids are being homeschooled online, which means they'll be learning alongside kids from all over the world. And as for us? Well, let's just say that we've got big dreams on our minds. We want to take house-flipping and real estate investing to new heights, while also sharing our passions with the people who matter most - you guys.

We love how connected we are now, and we can't wait to share all of our adventures with you from here forward. From Airbnb getaways in exotic destinations to room makeovers and DIY projects that showcase the best of what life has to offer, every step of this journey is going to be something special. We're talking epic storylines, memorable experiences, and behind-the-scenes peeks into the lives of a family living on the edge.

So what are you waiting for? Hit that subscribe button and join us on this wild ride. Give us a thumbs up if you love what we have to say - but most of all, write us a comment down below. We want to know: What's one thing you've learned from our adventures so far? Was it something about resilience? Or maybe it was about the importance of taking risks and trying new things? Let us know! And don't forget to share your own stories with us - we can't wait to hear them.

As I look around at my family, I'm reminded of just how lucky I am. My husband, Jack, is a rockstar in his own right, running marketing and business development for one of our companies. I work hard too, juggling real estate and design projects that are always pushing me to be my best self. And our kids? They're growing up so fast - Haley just graduated from high school, and Parker's off on a new adventure every week. It's exhausting and exhilarating all at once.

But here we are, in this moment, grateful for the life we've built together. We know that there will be ups and downs ahead, but we're not afraid of them. Instead, we're embracing the unknown with open arms, knowing that every day is a chance to create something new and amazing. And as I look at you guys, our tribe, my heart swells with gratitude for the love and support that surrounds us. We couldn't do this without you, and we can't wait to see what the future holds for all of us.

So here's to the next chapter - a chapter filled with excitement, curiosity, and adventure. Let's make some memories together!

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enwhat are the numbers yeah so we have moved 24 times in 17 years to four different countries and lived in three on three continents so now actually we've been married 21 years now we have but we moved to the house earlier than that goofball oh that's right i'm so sorry we lived here for four years hi welcome to the house of valentina i'm valentina and my husband jack is hanging out with me today because we are doing your most requested video like of all time this is the one that we get the most requests for and we wear a dance so what are we doing today we are talking about our backstory did we actually move 24 times have we actually lived in four different countries on three continents with three kids there's been a lot of speculation over here it has been a lot of you guys have said oh were you like spies or something i wish there'd be something cool bond girl oh yeah totally yeah i mean it could happen no nothing to do with this nothing that cool so so now that we've birthed their bubble no one's gonna want to watch it dang it gave it away at the beginning oh this whole time they were spies you weren't supposed to tell them that now we were gonna hold on to that the story is is that we're not nearly as cool as you thought we were um no we did but we have actually lived in 24 different places we have actually lived in all these different countries and yes we've traveled all over the world with our kids so let's back up before we get so far ahead of ourselves and actually tell them how we do we get to do the little cool little swingy things yeah groom back in time i'm not that good at editing swipe over into the past when i was born 40 years ago oh my god 40 years ago that was a good year i didn't play baseball 1979 i just slipped into the 70s remember when i used to babysit you that's not true the thing that people think sometimes is that we were like raised by ambassadors or we were raised overseas or any of these things neither one of us were like neither one of our lives were raised abroad even though we lived a big chunk of our lives abroad yeah but what happened with you at four because something you always tell me the story and i love it yeah i i this family come to visit and i'm gonna date myself with this part where we talk about the film projector projector projector where they're yeah totally and it was their pictures they they were living in vietnam and they come for a visit and i was sitting in this little desk and i remember the air must have the air must have kicked on because i could feel wind in my hair and i just remember thinking that's what i want to do with the rest of my life i want to live overseas and i want to help people like that they were doing some sort of water project i don't know i was poor i don't know what they were doing but what i do know is that it left a lasting impression on me and i knew from the time i was four that i wanted to move overseas and actually later on in my life my dad actually became an international pilot and that just made things even worse because i already knew i wanted to live overseas and then all of a sudden dad's like bringing home these cool things and i can actually show you he brings home things like this hungarian crystal and he pulls them out of his bag and i'm like it's all wrapped in like this cool paper and it looks different and i was like oh my gosh what is this and then he'd bring home pineapple like literally cases he had just flown from hawaii and it's like dripping down her arms i'm gonna put this down before i break it and it's i was obsessed i was the kid that did not wasn't into boy bands didn't have posters of you know background boys actually boys new kids on the block on my wall oh no i asked for subscriptions to national geographic as a kid and all the books and i would tear out those sheets and paste them up on my wall i just knew this is what i wanted to do unlike her who at four had this big moment in red national geographic when she was six i didn't do any of that stuff i didn't even know that things existed so i literally just lived and lived life and don't tell my kids this but if they're watching go do something else yes please please i actually failed spanish 101 why am i talking quietly spanish 101 and geography i failed geography i couldn't tell you where a single country was because i didn't think it was important because i thought i'm never going to go abroad why do i need to know these things so i kind of lived my life the complete opposite of you and that i was completely like oblivious to the rest of the world until i saw this project that i could go on when i was 21 and then i went on when i was 22 and it was the first time i'd ever been on a plane it was the first time i'd ever left the southeast part of the united states and suddenly i find myself in romania doing a camp doing this like student camp thing and it was like my entire world was blown and then i was addicted i came home and i subscribed to national geographic and i bought a gigantic world map and put it up over my surfing posters that i still had up because i'm still trying to be 18. and that's when our that's when my story changed and then fast forward just a few years you and i meet yeah and you're he's eight years older than me and a lot of people will ask that as well um so i look young for my age and i look old i'm young it's more like it yeah so when we met we the moment that i i saw jack sorry i can't tell the story about getting emotional i can't tell whether to be happy depends on the day sometimes sometimes i'm like that damn that day no i remember the moment that i met him i looked at him and i was like i just knew i was going to spend the rest of my life but then most day that's that's the date she was sentenced we we just knew from the time i was only 16 when that happened and he's eight years older than me so we weren't immediately together or anything don't call anybody no we were friends um and then we just realized that we had this passion that we both shared the desire to live overseas and we just we just knew that we were meant to be just part of who we were and it was just over a few years and actually the crazy thing is a few years later she wasn't 16 anymore but a few years later we went on a trip together yeah had our first kiss yeah in france you know what they say we didn't do it the french it wasn't a french kiss it was a good old american kiss yeah but it was like that and we were just like we were in love because we both shared the same value we both shared this passion for adventure and travel and we could geek out on the same stuff we had our matching passports very young i started college when i was 16. um i studied international affairs my my trajectory was a diplomacy this is the kind of degree that you get that's what the the degree is for um i imagine that i'd be living overseas and um so i'd started that before we knew each other i'd gone on a lot of trips myself my parents let me go at 17 years old to the african bush now i didn't go alone i went with a group that was going to to help people but what were they thinking i mean i was out there with wild animals don't let our kids watch and walk up to the local publix i know i know so that's what i did i was just we were just maybe oblivious i think just a little bit we were just like we just went we just did these things we just decided to do them and we just did them always been the type that i just want to live my life to the fullest i want to live it's the last drop so for me when i decided that we were supposed to be together the rest of our lives i didn't see any reason why i was gonna wait so we got married when i was 19. and you know when i have a 19 year old now what were my parents thinking i'm i'm good-looking but not that good-looking i've asked my mom more recently and she's like we just knew that you were gonna do whatever you wanted and i'm like you don't mess with this one fair enough the whole world know what we did we got together we had haley when we were 21 and then we were when you were 21 and then we just went yeah we wanted to help people we wanted to make a difference we thought we could save the world and so we just packed up took a baby with us and moved to spain and lived there for three years and there were parts of it that were just absolutely amazing this is the part of the backstory we can't tell you everything in one day we've lived a lot in these years and we're just going to sort of gloss over like most of you because we don't want to bore you maybe we'll save it for the memoirs i don't know but maybe one day if you guys have interest we can tell you more of these crazy things that we did but we arrived in that country and we thought we were gonna have like people that we were gonna be with and we ended up being pretty much alone and raising a baby in another country and we had to figure out everything on our own like everything how to pay a bill to how to grocery shop and it was crazy so at the end of that three years we decided this was insane oh my thinking yeah we're like forget this like we chose wrong let's go back to the us yeah so we moved back to the us at the end of that three years bought a house did everything that you're supposed to do for the american dream and about six months into it hated it and we just decided it was not for us it wasn't what we wanted um we wanted to go back overseas and do non-profit work again we didn't know how or where or what was going to happen we just knew that if we both still had that desire and then bingo another surprise yes a little bit more planned we weren't completely stupid not that much planned you'll notice that trend details story he wasn't permitted so anyways it's more of a passion project one more one more little stop it one more baby on the hip and we sold everything we owned again again and moved overseas with the intention of never coming back and i really mean that i really mean that we never thought we were coming back at that point this was a forever decision maybe if we we sold everything we took a very small container yeah we took it very little most of it was most of the container was full of things that we knew we wouldn't be able to get there so it wasn't personal items we hardly took anything with us and we just went so now we had a five-year-old and a two-year-old by the time we actually got over there took us a little while again there's a lot of this backstory bossing over um but yeah we arrived in morocco and immediately started studying moroccan arabic um a little i said so we speak arabic just a little just a little um but yeah we learned moroccan arabic and lived there for three years and had the most incredible experience of our lives i mean spain was amazing it kind of broke us into this idea of living in a different country morocco was wild and crazy and chaotic like living in an indiana jones movie it really was the time it really was the smells the sights the colors the sounds everything about it was just everything was like amped up 20 times even like the bugs i remember we would always say like even even the ants are bigger here like everything tasted better the music everything was just big yeah yeah it was incredible um and we were doing projects like helping with wells going into areas where they didn't have clean drinking water we were helping with solar hammam projects so that people could have running water to bathe and that's what we had or landon too lots of exciting stuff happening she had her first site travelingmama.net that was when we really started to understand social media it's when we got into everything and you would start taking pictures for the blog we literally i mean i was actually mad at you for starting that vlog i was like oh what am i gonna do with this thing i'm trying to raise kids she said no one's going to read a blog yeah so we just want to be a really fun way to stay connected to our families so i never took it very seriously i just posted pictures here and there some of the arts and crafts things that we were working on and um it was just i loved it i loved being able to connect it was the first time i realized i could connect with the entire world people were riding in from all the way from australia to you know the us and everywhere in between and it was it was really really cool i just always felt like homelessness place like all the craziness that happened all the travel that was happening i mean all these stories all these years are passing in this timeline that we're telling you and we traveled all over the place in the middle of it and i just always needed a home to come back to but we realized really early on that having a home was what kept us wherever we were so it was a really hard decision for us but you got a job offer to help with non-profit work to be more of a consultant kind of role and to be working out of copenhagen yeah so you talk about a change yeah we flew to copenhagen and it was just like so we went from so much heat and chaos to cold and pure serenity yeah structured there was a line for everything everything they really had a rule and so it was polar opposite as soon as we went we we really loved spain we really loved morocco but as soon as we landed in copenhagen it was like oh my gosh this is there's heaven on earth i said that i said that so many times while we were there we lived there for six years a lot of stuff that we're kind of glossing over to keep this a little bit kind of short and sweet for you today but basically we ended up back we were in copenhagen landon was two parker was five and haley was nine when we moved there and so for the boys especially that's their whole world that's all their memories were all in denmark we put all we always put our kids in national schools so our kids learned not only the oral dialect that we spoke of arabic they also learned the written arabic and french and when we got to denmark they they studied in danish they never studied in an english speaking school or even an english-speaking classroom all of them i asked our kids one time what language they dreamt in and they all said when we were in denmark they dreamt and they thought and they counted in danish and we were like whoa that's so i can't even do those things i can't even do what i'm awaiting my dreams yeah so the only time that we ever spoke to them the only time they ever really heard english actually was when we were at home that's the only english that they ever had and our time in copenhagen wow this life altering from yeah honestly we could do an entire video just on what we learned from from denmark because maybe we will maybe we'll do that video one day for you because because it's his impact has been profound it's changed it's changed our design aesthetics your design aesthetics has changed i didn't even own a black shirt before we moved to denmark no we showed up in the wrong color palette so we did and we learned so much our minds about creativity and being brave and just a million different gosh the impact has been substantial in our life we loved it we really did it was like heaven on earth i would say that so often i don't have to die to go to heaven because i've already found it i mean truly just an inexpressibly beautiful lovely place to live and to raise our kids and riding our bikes everywhere and the the healthy eating habits like everything about it it revolutionized our lives and so when it was time for us to move back there's a few different reasons why we did one of the reasons was it's very expensive to live in denmark and there were talks that maybe we might be sent back to the arab world potentially or some other location and we just felt like with haley at that point she was 15 trying to send a 15 year old and ask her it's ironic to cover her face i know i know so we didn't want to take away all of her freedom and and go back somewhere that would be even more closed than morocco that was pretty open it was pretty western um and the places that we were talking about would not be we had spent all these years from the time we left we had this 10 month old we can live some of the most epic epic stories with our kids well hey guys we are in where are we at guys and guess what we wish you were here with us at times i think that we thought that this was the end of our adventures we were gonna hang up our hats and it was gonna all be over but what i love most about us is that we see adventure everywhere and that we really believe that every day is it can be it can be a magical adventure and this next phase of our life was going to be different but it was also going to be something that we had been dreaming of for years and for the kids it was like coming to a foreign country to come back to the us they visited here and there but this was not their home no anytime we'd go out lana would say because he's the little guy lane would say dad what is what is taco bell what's arby's yeah like they had no ideas like costco what is a costco parker didn't think that minnesota was a real state no that's kind of catching you up so we restarted all of our businesses um jack works in marketing and business development obviously you guys know i work in real estate and design we we have a blast don't we i mean and our dream is to take all of this now like we're getting to the point now by the way haley just graduated from high school the kids are being schooled online now so we suddenly find ourselves with some freedom and we don't know what's gonna happen we are dreaming bigger than ever before we thought that 12 years abroad was big the things that we're dreaming of now are even bigger and they're things that we can include you guys on i think that's what gets us more excited than anything else in the world is that we have you guys you are our tribe and we don't have to go by ourselves we did all those adventures alone we were isolated it was hard and now we can do so much more with you guys and we want you to be a part of that so you are literally a part of the daydream of what we want for the future we we daydream about house of valentina airbnbs that you guys can go and stay at meetups being able to come to your cities your countries and being able to do room makeovers and house makeovers and show you the places that we love to go the place we love to eat the places we love to stay or visit or and showing us just as we go learn these things and letting you share that with us and maybe even on some of these you join with us wouldn't that be just the most amazing thing ever thank you so much for being a part of our lives and this journey that we've been on and we we would love to hear from you so i know we're getting to the end right that's where we hate say oh yeah hit subscribe we really want you to hit subscribe if you want to hear about more that's coming in the future we want you to give us a thumbs up but more than anything write us a comment down below let us know let us know one of the things we've kind of mentioned throughout the video hey would you like this would you like that would you like to know five things we learned from living in morocco that kind of stuff let us know down below thank you so much for coming bye guys and um yeah we'll see you in the next one bye oh yeah i'm not really sure of the back stories going so it's exciting i know it is exciting i know i know it is a little weird it's like oh we still have businesses to run and you know we are adults i know but you're still that same person who like took my breath away trying to butter me up looking at me my glasses are fine fogging up oh my gosh it reminds me of france oh pleasewhat are the numbers yeah so we have moved 24 times in 17 years to four different countries and lived in three on three continents so now actually we've been married 21 years now we have but we moved to the house earlier than that goofball oh that's right i'm so sorry we lived here for four years hi welcome to the house of valentina i'm valentina and my husband jack is hanging out with me today because we are doing your most requested video like of all time this is the one that we get the most requests for and we wear a dance so what are we doing today we are talking about our backstory did we actually move 24 times have we actually lived in four different countries on three continents with three kids there's been a lot of speculation over here it has been a lot of you guys have said oh were you like spies or something i wish there'd be something cool bond girl oh yeah totally yeah i mean it could happen no nothing to do with this nothing that cool so so now that we've birthed their bubble no one's gonna want to watch it dang it gave it away at the beginning oh this whole time they were spies you weren't supposed to tell them that now we were gonna hold on to that the story is is that we're not nearly as cool as you thought we were um no we did but we have actually lived in 24 different places we have actually lived in all these different countries and yes we've traveled all over the world with our kids so let's back up before we get so far ahead of ourselves and actually tell them how we do we get to do the little cool little swingy things yeah groom back in time i'm not that good at editing swipe over into the past when i was born 40 years ago oh my god 40 years ago that was a good year i didn't play baseball 1979 i just slipped into the 70s remember when i used to babysit you that's not true the thing that people think sometimes is that we were like raised by ambassadors or we were raised overseas or any of these things neither one of us were like neither one of our lives were raised abroad even though we lived a big chunk of our lives abroad yeah but what happened with you at four because something you always tell me the story and i love it yeah i i this family come to visit and i'm gonna date myself with this part where we talk about the film projector projector projector where they're yeah totally and it was their pictures they they were living in vietnam and they come for a visit and i was sitting in this little desk and i remember the air must have the air must have kicked on because i could feel wind in my hair and i just remember thinking that's what i want to do with the rest of my life i want to live overseas and i want to help people like that they were doing some sort of water project i don't know i was poor i don't know what they were doing but what i do know is that it left a lasting impression on me and i knew from the time i was four that i wanted to move overseas and actually later on in my life my dad actually became an international pilot and that just made things even worse because i already knew i wanted to live overseas and then all of a sudden dad's like bringing home these cool things and i can actually show you he brings home things like this hungarian crystal and he pulls them out of his bag and i'm like it's all wrapped in like this cool paper and it looks different and i was like oh my gosh what is this and then he'd bring home pineapple like literally cases he had just flown from hawaii and it's like dripping down her arms i'm gonna put this down before i break it and it's i was obsessed i was the kid that did not wasn't into boy bands didn't have posters of you know background boys actually boys new kids on the block on my wall oh no i asked for subscriptions to national geographic as a kid and all the books and i would tear out those sheets and paste them up on my wall i just knew this is what i wanted to do unlike her who at four had this big moment in red national geographic when she was six i didn't do any of that stuff i didn't even know that things existed so i literally just lived and lived life and don't tell my kids this but if they're watching go do something else yes please please i actually failed spanish 101 why am i talking quietly spanish 101 and geography i failed geography i couldn't tell you where a single country was because i didn't think it was important because i thought i'm never going to go abroad why do i need to know these things so i kind of lived my life the complete opposite of you and that i was completely like oblivious to the rest of the world until i saw this project that i could go on when i was 21 and then i went on when i was 22 and it was the first time i'd ever been on a plane it was the first time i'd ever left the southeast part of the united states and suddenly i find myself in romania doing a camp doing this like student camp thing and it was like my entire world was blown and then i was addicted i came home and i subscribed to national geographic and i bought a gigantic world map and put it up over my surfing posters that i still had up because i'm still trying to be 18. and that's when our that's when my story changed and then fast forward just a few years you and i meet yeah and you're he's eight years older than me and a lot of people will ask that as well um so i look young for my age and i look old i'm young it's more like it yeah so when we met we the moment that i i saw jack sorry i can't tell the story about getting emotional i can't tell whether to be happy depends on the day sometimes sometimes i'm like that damn that day no i remember the moment that i met him i looked at him and i was like i just knew i was going to spend the rest of my life but then most day that's that's the date she was sentenced we we just knew from the time i was only 16 when that happened and he's eight years older than me so we weren't immediately together or anything don't call anybody no we were friends um and then we just realized that we had this passion that we both shared the desire to live overseas and we just we just knew that we were meant to be just part of who we were and it was just over a few years and actually the crazy thing is a few years later she wasn't 16 anymore but a few years later we went on a trip together yeah had our first kiss yeah in france you know what they say we didn't do it the french it wasn't a french kiss it was a good old american kiss yeah but it was like that and we were just like we were in love because we both shared the same value we both shared this passion for adventure and travel and we could geek out on the same stuff we had our matching passports very young i started college when i was 16. um i studied international affairs my my trajectory was a diplomacy this is the kind of degree that you get that's what the the degree is for um i imagine that i'd be living overseas and um so i'd started that before we knew each other i'd gone on a lot of trips myself my parents let me go at 17 years old to the african bush now i didn't go alone i went with a group that was going to to help people but what were they thinking i mean i was out there with wild animals don't let our kids watch and walk up to the local publix i know i know so that's what i did i was just we were just maybe oblivious i think just a little bit we were just like we just went we just did these things we just decided to do them and we just did them always been the type that i just want to live my life to the fullest i want to live it's the last drop so for me when i decided that we were supposed to be together the rest of our lives i didn't see any reason why i was gonna wait so we got married when i was 19. and you know when i have a 19 year old now what were my parents thinking i'm i'm good-looking but not that good-looking i've asked my mom more recently and she's like we just knew that you were gonna do whatever you wanted and i'm like you don't mess with this one fair enough the whole world know what we did we got together we had haley when we were 21 and then we were when you were 21 and then we just went yeah we wanted to help people we wanted to make a difference we thought we could save the world and so we just packed up took a baby with us and moved to spain and lived there for three years and there were parts of it that were just absolutely amazing this is the part of the backstory we can't tell you everything in one day we've lived a lot in these years and we're just going to sort of gloss over like most of you because we don't want to bore you maybe we'll save it for the memoirs i don't know but maybe one day if you guys have interest we can tell you more of these crazy things that we did but we arrived in that country and we thought we were gonna have like people that we were gonna be with and we ended up being pretty much alone and raising a baby in another country and we had to figure out everything on our own like everything how to pay a bill to how to grocery shop and it was crazy so at the end of that three years we decided this was insane oh my thinking yeah we're like forget this like we chose wrong let's go back to the us yeah so we moved back to the us at the end of that three years bought a house did everything that you're supposed to do for the american dream and about six months into it hated it and we just decided it was not for us it wasn't what we wanted um we wanted to go back overseas and do non-profit work again we didn't know how or where or what was going to happen we just knew that if we both still had that desire and then bingo another surprise yes a little bit more planned we weren't completely stupid not that much planned you'll notice that trend details story he wasn't permitted so anyways it's more of a passion project one more one more little stop it one more baby on the hip and we sold everything we owned again again and moved overseas with the intention of never coming back and i really mean that i really mean that we never thought we were coming back at that point this was a forever decision maybe if we we sold everything we took a very small container yeah we took it very little most of it was most of the container was full of things that we knew we wouldn't be able to get there so it wasn't personal items we hardly took anything with us and we just went so now we had a five-year-old and a two-year-old by the time we actually got over there took us a little while again there's a lot of this backstory bossing over um but yeah we arrived in morocco and immediately started studying moroccan arabic um a little i said so we speak arabic just a little just a little um but yeah we learned moroccan arabic and lived there for three years and had the most incredible experience of our lives i mean spain was amazing it kind of broke us into this idea of living in a different country morocco was wild and crazy and chaotic like living in an indiana jones movie it really was the time it really was the smells the sights the colors the sounds everything about it was just everything was like amped up 20 times even like the bugs i remember we would always say like even even the ants are bigger here like everything tasted better the music everything was just big yeah yeah it was incredible um and we were doing projects like helping with wells going into areas where they didn't have clean drinking water we were helping with solar hammam projects so that people could have running water to bathe and that's what we had or landon too lots of exciting stuff happening she had her first site travelingmama.net that was when we really started to understand social media it's when we got into everything and you would start taking pictures for the blog we literally i mean i was actually mad at you for starting that vlog i was like oh what am i gonna do with this thing i'm trying to raise kids she said no one's going to read a blog yeah so we just want to be a really fun way to stay connected to our families so i never took it very seriously i just posted pictures here and there some of the arts and crafts things that we were working on and um it was just i loved it i loved being able to connect it was the first time i realized i could connect with the entire world people were riding in from all the way from australia to you know the us and everywhere in between and it was it was really really cool i just always felt like homelessness place like all the craziness that happened all the travel that was happening i mean all these stories all these years are passing in this timeline that we're telling you and we traveled all over the place in the middle of it and i just always needed a home to come back to but we realized really early on that having a home was what kept us wherever we were so it was a really hard decision for us but you got a job offer to help with non-profit work to be more of a consultant kind of role and to be working out of copenhagen yeah so you talk about a change yeah we flew to copenhagen and it was just like so we went from so much heat and chaos to cold and pure serenity yeah structured there was a line for everything everything they really had a rule and so it was polar opposite as soon as we went we we really loved spain we really loved morocco but as soon as we landed in copenhagen it was like oh my gosh this is there's heaven on earth i said that i said that so many times while we were there we lived there for six years a lot of stuff that we're kind of glossing over to keep this a little bit kind of short and sweet for you today but basically we ended up back we were in copenhagen landon was two parker was five and haley was nine when we moved there and so for the boys especially that's their whole world that's all their memories were all in denmark we put all we always put our kids in national schools so our kids learned not only the oral dialect that we spoke of arabic they also learned the written arabic and french and when we got to denmark they they studied in danish they never studied in an english speaking school or even an english-speaking classroom all of them i asked our kids one time what language they dreamt in and they all said when we were in denmark they dreamt and they thought and they counted in danish and we were like whoa that's so i can't even do those things i can't even do what i'm awaiting my dreams yeah so the only time that we ever spoke to them the only time they ever really heard english actually was when we were at home that's the only english that they ever had and our time in copenhagen wow this life altering from yeah honestly we could do an entire video just on what we learned from from denmark because maybe we will maybe we'll do that video one day for you because because it's his impact has been profound it's changed it's changed our design aesthetics your design aesthetics has changed i didn't even own a black shirt before we moved to denmark no we showed up in the wrong color palette so we did and we learned so much our minds about creativity and being brave and just a million different gosh the impact has been substantial in our life we loved it we really did it was like heaven on earth i would say that so often i don't have to die to go to heaven because i've already found it i mean truly just an inexpressibly beautiful lovely place to live and to raise our kids and riding our bikes everywhere and the the healthy eating habits like everything about it it revolutionized our lives and so when it was time for us to move back there's a few different reasons why we did one of the reasons was it's very expensive to live in denmark and there were talks that maybe we might be sent back to the arab world potentially or some other location and we just felt like with haley at that point she was 15 trying to send a 15 year old and ask her it's ironic to cover her face i know i know so we didn't want to take away all of her freedom and and go back somewhere that would be even more closed than morocco that was pretty open it was pretty western um and the places that we were talking about would not be we had spent all these years from the time we left we had this 10 month old we can live some of the most epic epic stories with our kids well hey guys we are in where are we at guys and guess what we wish you were here with us at times i think that we thought that this was the end of our adventures we were gonna hang up our hats and it was gonna all be over but what i love most about us is that we see adventure everywhere and that we really believe that every day is it can be it can be a magical adventure and this next phase of our life was going to be different but it was also going to be something that we had been dreaming of for years and for the kids it was like coming to a foreign country to come back to the us they visited here and there but this was not their home no anytime we'd go out lana would say because he's the little guy lane would say dad what is what is taco bell what's arby's yeah like they had no ideas like costco what is a costco parker didn't think that minnesota was a real state no that's kind of catching you up so we restarted all of our businesses um jack works in marketing and business development obviously you guys know i work in real estate and design we we have a blast don't we i mean and our dream is to take all of this now like we're getting to the point now by the way haley just graduated from high school the kids are being schooled online now so we suddenly find ourselves with some freedom and we don't know what's gonna happen we are dreaming bigger than ever before we thought that 12 years abroad was big the things that we're dreaming of now are even bigger and they're things that we can include you guys on i think that's what gets us more excited than anything else in the world is that we have you guys you are our tribe and we don't have to go by ourselves we did all those adventures alone we were isolated it was hard and now we can do so much more with you guys and we want you to be a part of that so you are literally a part of the daydream of what we want for the future we we daydream about house of valentina airbnbs that you guys can go and stay at meetups being able to come to your cities your countries and being able to do room makeovers and house makeovers and show you the places that we love to go the place we love to eat the places we love to stay or visit or and showing us just as we go learn these things and letting you share that with us and maybe even on some of these you join with us wouldn't that be just the most amazing thing ever thank you so much for being a part of our lives and this journey that we've been on and we we would love to hear from you so i know we're getting to the end right that's where we hate say oh yeah hit subscribe we really want you to hit subscribe if you want to hear about more that's coming in the future we want you to give us a thumbs up but more than anything write us a comment down below let us know let us know one of the things we've kind of mentioned throughout the video hey would you like this would you like that would you like to know five things we learned from living in morocco that kind of stuff let us know down below thank you so much for coming bye guys and um yeah we'll see you in the next one bye oh yeah i'm not really sure of the back stories going so it's exciting i know it is exciting i know i know it is a little weird it's like oh we still have businesses to run and you know we are adults i know but you're still that same person who like took my breath away trying to butter me up looking at me my glasses are fine fogging up oh my gosh it reminds me of france oh please\n"