The Sheffert family made the move to Park City last month – that’s not unusual – people move here all the time. For the Sheffert’s though, Park City is just one of three moves the family plans to make in the next year and a half in order to find the community they want to call home. Leslie Thatcher has more.
Sitinee Sheffert and her family - her husband and five children made the move to Park City July 8 from a suburb of Chicago Illinois. Park City is the first stop of three planned – they also plan to spend time in Denver Colorado and Austin, Texas. Sheffert explained the family’s lifestyle experiment.
“Park City, Denver, and Austin are three cities we area looking at. And Park City and Denver because we love the mountains. Being from a big city - it's pretty flat out there. But we've come out here for summer vacation and we just loved it – we love the way of life for our kids - our kids are outside biking and enjoying the outdoor weather. My husband owns his own business, so we’ve had the flexibility to be able to do this. So, we just decided we’re just going to up our roots, it was time to be courageous and try something new and we wanted to show our kids that, you know what, it’s OK to try something new. It's going to be fun, it’s going to be scary, but you know what, overall, it’s just going to make our family stronger. So, we decided probably in March to put our house on the market and we packed up our two SUVS and we headed out to the mountains.”
She says they came up with the three choices based on a visit to Park City last winter as well as the convenience of her husband’s job.
“My husband owns a company in Austin and he goes there every quarter for the past 3 or 4-year s and he said there’s some vibe in Austin that’s just really cool. I’m afraid of the summer humidity .I love it here - where it’s dry. But I’m like we’re going to stick with the process and we’re going to try this journey out. I’ve never been to Austin so I’m excited to try that out. Denver was our first exposure to the mountains. So that’s why we’re going to live int eh foothills of the Golden/Evergreen area and just see what’s it’s like again. We lived in the big city, so we wanted a different pace of life. I wanted to be really able to enjoy each moment with my kids. I was running around from activity to activity in Chicago and being stuck in traffic so right now, being in Park City and I assume where we’ll be in Denver will be a nice change of pace for us.”
While it’s not easy for kids to leave their friends and schools, she says they sold their older children on the outdoors and the adventure lifestyle…and she will plan to homeschool them during the experiment months…
“We were enticing them with all of the great different adventures that they’re going to have. My son has already picked up the mountain biking. We got him a new bike out here. He’s out there every day and then we told our girls the same thing -you know, the outdoors - we love the outdoors – you guys get to do to do this all the time. And with ski season comes, some you get to ski all the time. And something that’s going to make it a lot easier for us to really experience everything is I’m going to homeschool the kids for the next 15 months, so I told the kids, you know what, on Mondays or Tuesdays, we could go skiing in the morning and then we could do our homeschooling later in the afternoon., So we’ve got the flexibility. I’ve showed the kids we don’t need to stick to a traditional lifestyle – we can try something different.”
After spending time in each place, she says the family will make the choice.
“My 3 older kids are 11, 9 and 8 so part of our plan is we’re going to sit down as a family. They’re going to do research also on each city 0- all the schools and neighborhoods and then we’re going to come together as a family and decide which city we think is going to be best. So, it’s going to be very collaborative – it’s not going to just be mom and dad saying where we’re going to live. So, the kids can have a say and they’re excited about that.”
The Shefferts will be in Park City until just before Christmas. Right now, she says she doesn’t know what their next move will be…
