I was born in a hospital half an hour from the house where I lived for 18 years, where my parents still live. My dad worked for the same company my entire life, which he is now retired from. I went to the same school district my entire life, graduating from the high school two miles from my house. For 18 years of my life, most of my world revolved around a five mile radius.

Sometimes our children’s worlds are very much like our childhoods, and sometimes, they are very different. I hope that Mr. Snowflake and I provide the amazing childhood my parents provided for me. But I also know that in many ways it will look very different. These ways aren’t good or bad, just different.

Snowy is five years old, and she’s lived in four different residences in three different towns. The day I found out I was pregnant with Snowy, less than a month after Mr. Snowflake and I wed, was the day we moved into our one-bedroom apartment on my graduate school’s campus. We did one small move to a two-bedroom on the same campus right around when she started crawling, and a much bigger move for a job that I thought was my dream job, but ended up not working out, in a town about an hour away from my grad school. We stayed there for almost two years, and recently relocated to where we’re hopefully going to be nearby long-term, a city much closer to family and a support system.

I’ve worked practically Snowy’s entire life, but my life as a working mom has taken many different forms. Since Mr. Snowflake was in law school, it made more sense with my schedule, often only having classes one day at week, and the fact I had no commute for me to be the one to work. The fact that I was attending graduate school on a stipend helped tremendously. I also worked several different jobs, from the children’s consignment store I was lucky enough to find a position at that let me bring her in when she was just an infant, to working as a preschool teacher so that I could receive discount tuition.

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These transitions also have meant a number of different childcare arrangements for Snowy. I had an amazing sitter for her first year of life that would watch her when I was in class. Then it was her first center, filled with caring employees, which I later worked at. She started there two days a week, then moved to full time. She was at her next center for just over a year, from ages two to three, coinciding with our big move, and two more centers following that, coinciding with me working for centers.

Snowy has been remarkably flexible with all the different school moves: I think having me as a teacher in the building helped tremendously! But even as I transitioned to a different kind of educational non-profit and we moved to a new city to be near family, she did even better than I expected (heck, even better than I did!). She’s never been shy, and she’s always been open to new experiences, something that has served her well in our rather itinerant lifestyle so far.

I think it helps that change has always been part of Snowy’s life. Of course transitions are hard, but they’re not scary, they’re a normal part of life. We’ve always tried to do our best to frame them as adventures to her, and to talk her through them.

But Snowy is about to navigate two new very big changes, and while I’m framing them as adventures for her, I can’t help but be a little nervous myself (while trying my best not to have it show) about navigating all the change.

Since before Christmas, Snowy has been staying at home with Mr. Snowflake, which has been wonderful. He’s taken her on so many adventures, and he’s been a really amazing stay at home dad. It was definitely what our family needed for that period in time as he searched for the right opportunity in our new city. It’s super hard when you move to a specific area to find two jobs in different fields, especially when it’s a small city with a weak job market! But Mr. Snowflake is about to start a new full-time job, which means another transition for our little family. Snowy is going to go back to the daycare she started at when we moved here in October. She loves it, except naptime, and the fact that she hates naptime is making her not want to go back to school at all (definitely something I want to talk to the teacher about and brainstorm potential solutions, since she has completely outgrown her nap here at home.) It’s going to be a transition for all of us. I’ll go back to being the sole person getting her ready for school and doing drop off. I know I’ll be able to navigate it, but as a chronically ill full time working mom who knows any little change can throw me into a flare, I’m definitely nervous!

And then, in just a few months we will have a whole new ball game to navigate: kindergarten! But honestly, I can’t even think about that transition and the changes it’s going to bring to our family until after I’ve navigated this one.

Transitions are never easy. And I know that for me, having a number of changes right on top of each other, with seemingly no consistency, has sometimes been a huge battle. But change is a fact of life, and so far, all the changes in our lives have been for the better. We navigate them as a team, and celebrate the little victories in these changes as we go.