laurenjpass@gmail.com

With Nick’s job, we move a lot. Every summer we move to a different place in the country, and leave our family and friends back in Utah. We’ve also moved from apartment to apartment to house a lot in between. We counted our moves recently, and they have totaled 12 since we were married 5 years ago. In between all of those moves we’ve learned some valuable lessons about all sorts of things moving related.

I wanted to create a series of blog posts centered around moving, talking about all different aspects, and helpful tips and tricks. I’m planning on including things like: tips for packing, tips for the day of the move, adjusting to living in a new city and meeting new people, and in this post I’ll be talking about saying goodbye to family and loved ones. If you have any other suggestions of aspects of moving to discuss, please let me know!

Disclaimer: We’ve only ever moved impermanently, so it hasn’t ever been as hard for us as it will be for others. But we have had to be away from family/friends for half of the year every year. These are our tips from this background, however, they should be applicable to all moving situations.

Make sure to schedule time around your move to say all of the goodbyes you want to: I would suggest to start saying your goodbyes as early as a couple weeks before. If there’s a friend that you can’t see as regularly, plan a get together a couple of weeks before. Then space out your other goodbyes. I typically save family for last, so that I can give them the last goodbye, and we can spend the most time with them. Nothing’s harder than trying to squeeze all of your goodbyes in in the last couple of days when you are packing and already very overwhelmed.

Don’t put too much pressure on the goodbye: Your family might be having a rough day, your friends might be having a rough day, your kids might be having a rough day, you might even be having a rough day. Don’t put too much pressure on the goodbye; just spend time together and make sure they know you love them.

Just say goodbye “for now”: Saying goodbye is so much easier if it doesn’t seem like the end of your relationship as you know it. Plan a time to visit family/friends, or have family/friends visit you, even if its a year from now. Having something to look forward to, and get excited about will make the transition more of a “goodbye for now,” rather than a “goodbye forever.”

Plan a time to call/Facetime often: If you are the type of person that has a hard time remembering to FaceTime loved ones, plan a time each day, each week or each month, where you can FaceTime them and have time to reconnect and catch up. This will ensure that you sustain your relationship, and it’ll take the guesswork out of when to call.

Do you have any tips on saying goodbye to loved ones?? Or any moving blog post ideas that you’d love to see discussed? If so, let me know in the comments!

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A couple of months ago, I asked one of my best friends Lindsay, if she would help me put together a spring floral arrangement for the blog. She creates the most beautiful stuff, and she’s been doing floral arranging for years. Some of her most recent jobs included tutoring students on floral arranging, working as a florist at Foxglove Floral in Provo, and doing florals for private events. So basically, she is a wealth of knowledge!

When she agreed, I was so excited. I knew she would create something amazing, and that she would be able to describe it in a simple, straightforward way, since she taught students for so long.

Having said all of that, here are four steps to create a beautiful spring arrangement:

Step 1: Start with the greenery. Trim them as you go to the desired lengths, to help them with water absorption. Place them in a vase/vessel (this arrangement looks really pretty in a shallow vessel with a wide mouth) with a generous amount of water in it, in a way that looks pretty as a base to you. Don’t overthink it. We used two different types of eucalyptus. If you put them in a grid pattern, they will help hold in the other flowers you will add later.

Step 2: Add the mass flowers, that will take up the bulk of the space in your arrangement. We added blue hydrangeas. Trim them to their desired lengths, and then add them around the base of your vase, so they are almost resting on the edge. For this arrangement we used three, so it can be viewed from any angle.

Step 3: Add the focal flowers. The focal flowers we used were pretty, pink tulips! Trim them to their desired lengths and then add them in the vase, filling them into open spaces, and just placing them where you think they’ll look nice.

Step 4: Add the filler flowers. We used feverfew for ours. These are little fillers, that you can add into any little spaces that you’d like to be filled, or could just use a little something extra. Trim them to their desired lengths before you add them.

Something Lindsay and I kept coming back to while we were working on our arrangements, was how simple and approachable floral arrangements really are. The medium (flowers) that you are working with is already so beautiful, that you can’t go too wrong with any arrangement. So just get started, play around with the flowers and it’ll turn out awesome.

How cute is she??

When Lindsay took the bouquet home she added a couple of ranunculus too. So that’s always an option. But it still looks so beautiful without them!

**Also, pro tip, Trader Joe’s has awesome and inexpensive flowers. They come in little individual bundles, so you can buy exactly what you are looking for and they’re pretty affordable.

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Author: laurenjpass@gmail.com

Moving: On saying goodbye to family and loved ones

4 steps to a beautiful spring floral arrangement