Tuesday, February 14th, 2012

For an expat family (or for this expat family, anyway) putting down roots somewhere can be difficult. The possibility of moving on is always present. The culture and language are not our own, we don’t have much family nearby and the current world economic situation means that jobs are more likely to change than not.
So how do you settle down? Put down roots? Feel connected?
In our case, the beginning of an answer to that question lies in buying real estate. We’ve finally become homeowners (ok, apartment owners). Read more »
At almost 19 months old, Ramzi is just starting to really get talking. Read more » |
The hardest thing for me about our unique little family is our unique extended family situation. Read more » |
Ok, so our trip to Lebanon happened back in April and since then I haven’t checked in to share what our trip was like. Read more » |
We're packing. Making lists, buying gifts, digging through boxes to find the summer clothes, putting together what will eventually look like a miniature pharmacy (what can I say, my kids are sick all the time). We're checking passports, reserving the taxi; in short, it's time to go visit my in-laws.
For Americans, visits are usually short. Maybe we can thank Ben Franklin and his quip about fish and visitors smelling after three days. Read more » |
In France, officials and pundits like to talk about how France is 20 years behind the United States. Sometimes this is portrayed as a positive (obesity rates, crime statistics), and sometimes as a negative (technology, business, customer service). As an American living in France for over ten years, I can see how it's both.
Those Americans who grew up before the 80s may remember certain freedoms we had as children: playing outside on summer evenings on the sidewalk with the other neighborhood kids, riding bikes around aimlessly, walking to swimming pools and friends' houses to play. Read more » |
My husband and I are opposites. He has black hair—that rare, true, deep black—which is thick and wavy. I have straight, fine, reddish hair. His eyes are deep brown, mine are green. I am so fair that I can get sunburned just thinking about the sun; he sports a deep tan year round.
So perhaps it shouldn't be surprising that we each have a child who looks nothing like us. Read more » |
One of my greatest fears as a new parent, right after Matthew's birth, was about putting him in school in France. While I hadn't done much research on the system, its results surrounded me: a culture where it's a bad idea to accept responsibility for one's mistakes, where apologizing is seen as a sign of weakness, where people talk down to one another in a way that sounds suspiciously like what you would hear a caregiver say to a naughty two-year-old. Read more » |
Education.
One word, carrying so much baggage. Hope for the future; worries about its quality and quantity. And for families raising bilingual or multilingual children, the language question adds another dimension of difficulty, especially if you are lucky enough to live in a place where you have lots of options.
Matthew is four and a half. School starts at age three in France (although it isn't mandatory until age six). Read more » |
They say the last holdout of cultural assimilation can be found in the refrigerator, or the kitchen cupboards. Food is such a primal thing—we are what we eat.
I was thinking about this yesterday, watching Matthew eat his snack: peanut butter and jelly on Lebanese bread. A French friend who was visiting laughed and made a comment about the marriage of two cultures. Read more » |
Eight days before Halloween, on a misty Saturday afternoon, I had what the French call "un grand moment de solitude." I was in a nearly-deserted park, one designed on a truly grandiose scale. Matthew, age four, was standing next to me, dressed in a raincoat and boots, with a king's cape. A golden crown was on his head and a foam sword was tucked into his improvised kingly belt made out of a playsilk that had been languishing, unused, for years in his toy box. Read more » |
It's only from a distance of months or years or decades that you can look back and see how one apparently small decision nudged the course of your life in a totally unexpected direction. I don't really know why I decided to take French my sophomore year in high school. I grew up on the Mexican border; it would have been much more practical to take Spanish. Read more » |
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