When the whole family falls ill in the middle of a move. On letting go and picking it back up.

What this post is really about:

What happens when life stops you completely in the middle of the biggest logistical challenge of your life
The moment you realise some things cannot be pushed through
What you let go of and what you hold onto
Why writing down 89 things was the most helpful thing we did

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Three full time jobs. That is what the weeks before our London move have felt like.

My actual job. Parenting two young children. And planning an international relocation that has a list of outstanding tasks so long we finally wrote it all out in one place just to see it clearly.

There were 89 items on that list.

And then everyone got sick.

How it started

It began with our son. A sniffle from kindergarten that turned into a bad cough, then into a fever that would not settle — fluctuating enough that we made two trips to the paediatrician in one week. Our daughter caught it next. One week of uncomfortable, feverish, clingy children who just wanted to be held.

We took childcare leave and we stopped.

Not because we wanted to. Because they needed us completely and nothing else could come first.

And then, because that is how illness works in a family, it reached us too. My husband and I both went down for another five days after the children started to recover. I am still breastfeeding which means the medication I can take is limited. We were both running on very little.

For almost two weeks, the move preparations effectively paused.

The moment we knew we had to stop

It was not a dramatic decision. It was just obvious.

When your children are uncomfortable and feverish and reaching for you, the to-do list does not matter. The tenant search does not matter. The 89 items do not matter. You put everything down and you hold them.

And when we fell ill ourselves, there was simply no point in pushing through. We had been racing against time for weeks. The illness forced us to slow down in a way that we probably needed even if we would not have chosen it.

There is something clarifying about being genuinely unwell. All the things that felt urgent reveal themselves as things that can wait. The things that cannot wait — being present for your children, keeping the household functional, rest — become very obvious very quickly.

What we let go of and what we could not

We took leave from work but stayed connected for what genuinely could not wait. That was a boundary we held gently — doing what we could on the mend, not pushing before we were ready.

We paused the tenant search entirely. It will still be there when we resurface.

What we absolutely could not let go of was being there for our children. That was never negotiable. Everything else was negotiable.

The 89 item list that somehow helped

Before the illness hit, we had been feeling increasingly swamped by the weight of everything still to do. So we did something that felt almost counterintuitive — we used Claude to help us write out every single outstanding task in one place.

89 items.

Seeing it all laid out like that should have been terrifying. And for a moment it was.

But then something shifted. Because alongside those 89 items, we could also see everything we had already done. The visa. The insurance review. The POA. The school research. The countless evenings of planning after the children were asleep. The blog posts that documented each step as we went.

We had done so much already. The list was long but it was not infinite. And we could see the shape of it.

Striking things off one by one gave us back a sense of agency in a moment when illness had taken it away. It helped us breathe.

What we are taking away from this

We are approximately six weeks from our departure date. The pace will only increase from here.

But this chapter — the sick week, the pause, the 89 items — reminded us of something important.

You cannot control everything. You cannot will your children’s fever down. You cannot push through when your body is telling you to stop. And trying to do both at once just means doing neither well.

Accepting the situation for what it is, without fighting it, without guilt, without forcing through — that is not giving up. That is wisdom. Particularly when you are carrying this much.

We will pick it all back up. We already have. The to-do list is shorter now. The children are well. We are on the mend.

One item at a time. One chapter at a time.

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If this resonated, you might also want to read:

The mental load of relocating while working and parenting. Why you need to give yourself grace.

Should we move to London with young children? Here’s how we actually made the decision.

Are you in the middle of a big move and feeling the weight of it all? Drop a comment below. You are not alone in this.