Elliot calls our apartment in Dar es Salaam ‘the bat house’, because there’s a big colony of bats in the surrounding trees. From the balcony where we hang our washing, you can look directly at bats hanging in the tree only centimetres away, and at dawn and dusk they fill […]
Estimated reading time: 2 minutes
I like routine. Someone told me I’d be a liability living cross-culturally because of that but I’m not wedded to it. Things come up: kids get sick, sometimes friends are in need, I’m asked to teach at something at the last minute, we’re informed that we’re hosting a dinner, etc. […]
Estimated reading time: 5 minutes
The other day at our breakfast table, Elliot came out with, “They don’t say grace before they eat at my kindy.” Arthur and I tried to work out what he was drawing the comparison with. We have never been a big grace-saying family. We’ve been doing it a bit more […]
Estimated reading time: 3 minutes
Arthur and I have been trying to put our finger on why kindy drop off is so different in Australia. At his new kindy, Elliot enters, signs himself in, hangs up his bag, puts his hat on, and goes off to play. What’s unusual about that? Contrast that with his first […]
Estimated reading time: 2 minutes
We are in Australia again, somewhat unexpectedly. And I find myself parenting TCKs through transition once again. Except we don’t know how long this stint will last for, which means I can’t use my go-to strategy for making things concrete, that is, having a countdown. There are the initial transitions, […]
Estimated reading time: 3 minutes
Elliot changed nursery schools recently. At first we were motivated pragmatically: because of our religious and cultural background, we would be unlikely to get him into the primary school we wanted (read: affordable without being an hour away from home) unless he was already in the nursery school. But then, […]
Estimated reading time: 5 minutes
On Mondays over the next few weeks for something a bit more lighthearted I’ll be posting some very short anecdotes of cross-cultural moments from the last little while. Here’s the first one. Just before Elliot went on school holidays we were talking about playing soccer and he said, “Girls don’t play […]
Estimated reading time: 1 minute