Why?

We have become what we swore we wouldn’t.

My husband and I had everything going for us. We needed to be on the move constantly; so we moved from Minnesota to Colorado where outdoor adventures were plentiful. We had awesome jobs in the oil and gas industry, which included regular parties downtown Denver. We had an itch for adventure, which brought us white water rafting, mountain climbing and biking, hiking and camping, snowboarding, and site-seeing.

After living in Colorado for almost 5 years, in 2015, the oil and gas industry took a turn for the worst. My company shut its U.S. doors, and I lost my job. I received another job offer shortly after, but before accepting, we decided that maybe now was the perfect time to move back home to Minnesota. We feared that we would never get an opportunity like this again. What if I loved my job as much as I loved my first one? – That would be incredibly hard to leave. We didn’t want to wait too long because we wanted to be with family when we decided to start our own family.

2015 was an amazingly busy year for the two of us. We moved our small family of 4 (my husband, myself, our dog, and our fish) to a small house in our hometown. We got new jobs. We planned our wedding and were married on a cruise ship. We left for our honeymoon; and when we got back, we focused on getting thank-you’s to all of our friends and family that came with us on the cruise or who sent us gifts.

Now it’s been a year since our honeymoon, and we are comfortable. We settled into our small house in suburbia. I am just keeping my head above water at my job as a financial analyst at a large corporation, with unbelievably long hours, and not enough vacation. Every day we come home exhausted. Yes, sitting behind a desk for 12 hours with no breaks can still be exhausting even when you don’t physically move!

We are 27 years old and don’t have energy to do a thing after work. The weekends consist of ordering pizza and relaxing from our long work weeks, doing laundry, going grocery shopping, and cleaning the house. We enjoy not having to do anything for two days (that’s if we don’t have to work on that specific weekend, which does happen too).

I want to point out that we do have fun occasionally in the summer on a couple of the weekends that Nathan doesn’t work. We bought dirt bikes last year with our tax return money and bring them to my parents’ cabin and his family cabin and go crazy –fast and dirty! However, I think we were only able to do that 3 times last year.

I read a quote a couple of weeks ago that has haunted me since: “Some people die at 25 and aren’t buried until 75.” – Benjamin Franklin

That is us! We did die at age 25 when we moved back to our hometown. Yes, we were busy getting married and moving and learning our new jobs, but we also stopped living what a real life should be. Life should not be work, sleep, clean, repeat. That is not okay to me, or my husband, or hopefully you.

That’s the “why”. Here is the solution:

We have come up with a new way that we want to live life – so I’m creating this blog to document our new life-changing journey. I’m hoping it will keep us inspired and possibly, no, hopefully, inspire others as well!

We have created the start of a bucket list, which is just a list of things, big or small, that we want to see/try/taste/experience/do during our lifetime. We will explain how we find the time, money, and motivation behind each item that we complete on the list so that others can follow in our footsteps or use pieces of our journey to start their own.

So here’s #1: Start a blog.

This weekend for a more exciting item to cross off the list!

Our world is such an amazing place. There is no reason for anyone to not enjoy their lives they way they were meant to. We only get one life. We get one shot. Are you wasting it, or are you living it to the fullest?