Wishes And Pixie Dust

Follow the journey of a Wisconsin family of 4 who relocated to the Walt Disney World area in July 2011


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A Time For Sharing

Friday, January 21, 2011

We have been planning our move to Florida since 2007, when it was more of a dream.  A plan to do “someday”.  In 2008 we became more serious about our long-term goal and in Fall 2008 we set our moving date as September 15, 2012.  It still seemed so far away.

We discovered The Relocated Tourist blog www.relocatedtourist.com, looked at each other and thought, “What are the odds?”  Here was a family in Wisconsin who was planning to do exactly what we wanted to do. In June of 2010 we set up our own blog to document the moving process.  We initially had some discussion on what to call it, but decided on “Wishes and Pixie Dust”, because we felt we would need a great helping of each to achieve our dream of moving our family to Florida!  We chose When You Wish Upon A Star as our theme song because the words fit perfectly, and we have clung to those words over the past several months.

Last fall Jen picked up her dream of becoming an elementary school teacher and attended the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh part time.  This meant pushing back the move to June 2013, after graduation.  While it was for a worthwhile reason, it was also very disheartening to have to wait even longer.

A couple of weeks ago we had the distinct pleasure of meeting Amy and Craig Petermann, www.relocatedtourist.com, and over dinner their enthusiasm in their move to Florida made us re-evaluate our plans.  Afterwards, Mark and I had a long discussion, and asked ourselves, “Can we do this in a few months?”, and the answer was a resounding “yes”! We have waited to share who we are with the Facebook community until we were sure details were worked out with Mark’s workplace.  It is definitely in place, and we decided to use the Petermann’s blog as a way to reveal who we are.

So, we are the Vitek family:  Mark, Jen, Catie and Ben.  (Nick is our oldest son, but is not choosing to move with us).

We will keep our Wishes and Pixie Dust presence on Facebook, and this is where we will share all our moving updates.  Some of our friends on Wishes and Pixie Dust are also our friends on our personal Facebook pages.  If you are not, please feel free to add either Mark or myself as a friend.  We will keep our website up and running, but the Facebook friend Wishes and Pixie Dust will disappear after we make our move, and we’d love to stay in contact with everyone.

We so appreciate all your support and love all the new friendships we’ve made.

Jen and Mark


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Long Distance Moving

Thursday, January 20, 2011

Everyone should prepare for a long-distance move. Now, before you think I’m crazy, hear me out.

I think I shared that one of our goals is to have our basement emptied by the end of the March, and that we intend to go through at least one box a day to achieve that goal. We’re definitely on track with that. The interesting thing about this is that we are not keeping most of it. As we go through the boxes, we are very selective about what we keep.

To preface this, we have moved four times in our thirteen + years of marriage. Our first move was from Chicago to Fond du Lac, each of us driivng a U-Haul truck through rush hour on the expressway. Yeah, that took a few years off our lives! The other three moves were within the city, using U-Haul each time. For each move, we have brought all our possessions with us, minimizing some but not really taking an intense look at what we own.

So as we go through the boxes now, for our fifth (and what we hope) our final move, we find that it’s really freeing to let go of what we own. Do we really need to move a 24 year old typewriter to Florida? What about all the saved baby clothes? (Our youngest will be 11 in March). No, really we don’t. We keep what is truly important to us, take pictures of/and discard the rest. We are not doing a huge rummage sale before we leave, but we are donating to Freecycle and Goodwill.

It’s not always easy, and sometimes it’s downright hard to part with items. But for us we are keeping our eyes on the goal, and we would much rather be in Florida minus possessions, than in Wisconsin with possessions. Yes we could move with all our stuff, but it begs the question, do we really want to? And our answer is no.

It’s a wonderful feeling, which is why I say everyone should prepare for a long distance move. Even if you have no intentions of actually moving, pretend you are and discard the clutter out of your life.

You won’t be sorry you did.

Jen


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Here We Go!

Thursday, January 13, 2011

Mark talked with work today, so it’s all confirmed and we are set to go!

We are going to try to be as active and detailed with this blog as possible.  One, it helps to keep us accountable, and see what we have yet to do.  Two, we hope that it provides inspiration and guidance to those who may want to follow in our footsteps and follow their dream of moving to Florida.   We are currently exploring the possibility of moving away from Blogger as our template, so you may in the next month or so see our website under construction at times.

Goal #1:  Go Paperless

We have a lot of paper that comes into this house on a regular basis.   Our goal is to have very little mail come into our house.  At this point we don’t know where we will live, and it’s possible that we still won’t know on moving day.  This, of course, presents a problem in forwarding mail.   We can rent a PO Box online, but it’s not active until we pick up the keys in person.

I went to Walmart today and picked up a file box and an expanding file.  The goal is to move a 2 drawer file cabinet contents into the file box.  I am not sure yet what will be done with the file cabinet.  It is an oak file cabinet that was received as a Christmas present 3 years ago, and it is still in excellent shape.  It may move with us, it may not.  We have time to decide.

The expanding file will serve as our “information” file– all papers that we need with us, such as car titles, housing information, maps, etc.  It should solve the question of:  “Now where did we put that information”.

No new magazine subscriptions will be ordered or single magazines purchased.  It saves money, though we only order free or cheap subs, but more importantly it saves us from having to be concerned with forwarding them on (and moving individual copies).  Any new magazines that we wish to read can be obtained from the library for free. Note:  It might be hard for me not to pick up Scrapbooks Etc!

A second issue with paper clutter comes with the kids’ school papers.   I am not a hoarder except when it comes to my kids’ school papers.  As of November of last year, I had every single paper and art project that came into the house. We’re talking years and years of papers!  Thankfully, yes, I have seen the light and realize that it does not all need to be kept. A lot was recycled last year, but it will need to be gone through again.  I’m thinking maybe a file box for each? And pictures taken of the projects.  I can foresee the pictures of the projects as being a scrapbook album project once we are moved!

Thank you all for following us on our journey, and feel free to invite your friends to follow us as well!  We appreciate the support and any advice that you may give!

Jen


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A Dream Reignited

Tuesday, January 11, 2011

We have a great update today.  Jen and I met with some great friends on Sunday and afterwards began talking about our dream of living in FL near to WDW.  After looking at all of our options and considering our children’s schooling, etc. we came to the realization that our dream shouldn’t wait any longer.  So, as you can tell from our updated Countdown Clock to the right, we’re now moving to FL on July 25, 2011; just a few short months away!  We will keep our story going here for you to keep up with our plans as we make this jump.

Mark


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Update- One Dream Deferred, One Continues

Sunday, September 19, 2010

Good evening all.  We had been quiet this past month but have an update to share. Jen’s dream of being a teacher was looking like it might need to wait, but through God’s graces she has now been able to switch schools and continue.

The “bad” news is that we will need to move back our moving date to June 15, 2013, about 9 months later than we had been planning.  This puts our countdown under the 1000 day mark today.

But, this brings good news as well.  Now, we’ll return to our loved WDW next August, in time to celebrate Catie’s 13th Birthday.

We continue to look forward to sharing our Adventure with you all.

Mark