Lemme preface this with the fact that this may be a little messy. 🤪

Something I'm learning about myself (more on this another day!) is that I have a hard time pressing “publish.” The amount of words I've written, the amount of resources I've created that have never seen the light of day because I wrote them and just never pressed “publish?” It's like, a whole library. 🤦🏼‍♀️

I am short on time today, but I WANT to give you an update, so I'm going to write this blog post like I would an email to a bff (minimal proofreading!).

So — consider yourself warned! lol.

👇👇👇

“Steph, I thought you guys moved to Spain to make your childcare situation easier?! So — why are you and Carl juggling kid life and work life even MORE right now than you even were in Nashville?”

A few friends, seeing my intermittent Instagram posts about HOW.MANY.HOURS.IN.A.ROW I've spent with toddlers these last few months 🤪, sent me that question.

“Steph, I thought you moved for easier childcare?!”

We did — but there was a tradeoff.

FIRST IT'S HARDER, THEN IT'LL BE EASIER

So, at least in our experience, for kids who are preschool age and younger, we've found childcare to be difficult to find, super competitive to get spots, and ridiculously expensive. (Like, $35K – $40K for us PER YEAR in the last few years). If we want to both work — keep decently regular work hours — that's what it costs us in childcare.

And that's a big reason why we decided to make the move to Spain, and why we decided to make the move now.

As we were looking ahead at the next few years, we realized that one of us was going to have to quit our jobs to stay home with the girls (which would also delete half of our family's income) — or we'd have to pay $35-$40K per year in childcare costs (which, also kinda deletes a huge chunk of our family's income).

There HAS to be another way, right? So we decided to make one.

The girls are old enough to start school in Spain (It's called Infantíl, similar to preschool), and it's free. 🙏 (I think that public preschool is something that's starting to be offered, or offered in some places in the US, but especially at the time of making this decision, we had years to go before the girls would be eligible for any sort of free school).

We'd always wanted to move to Spain, to take our kids abroad, to work on our Spanish and have the girls learn too. But the fact that we'd get to avoid at least one of the years of ridiculously expensive childcare made it a much easier (and more fiscally responsible!) leap to take.

But — the downside is that our daycare in the states was a year-round daycare. Regular school, as we know, doesn't work the same way.

THE SUMMER SLOG:

So, for the last few months, we've been doing the same slog as every other parent in the United States — trying to keep our kids occupied without help over the summer, while also trying to keep the rest of our lives and our jobs afloat.

It's… so… hard…

It's just SO many hours to fill, so many days in a row, so many weeks on end — and this was our first time navigating that.

(I have so many more thoughts on this. Like, what do other parents DO about this!? It's not like adults just get to quit their jobs over the summer and resume them in the fall! The best answer I've heard is summer camps, but you have to get spots in like, January? And they're SUPER expensive. What in the WORLD!!? And if anyone tells me how many summers I have left with my kids before they turn 18, I'm going to freak out. I'm supposed to work while my kids are at home and also provide them this magical summer and enjoy every minute of it while simultaneously dreading the day that they leave home? That's just way too much).

Also, while we're talking about this — what are parents supposed to do about the fact that school usually gets out at 2 or 3pm, and work usually doesn't end until 5? I do NOT want to believe that having a job and having kids are mutually exclusive, but goodness gracious, it does feel like having two full-time jobs all at the same time).

All of that to say, that's been our biggest struggle since moving to Spain exactly two months ago — the fact that we're trying to find housing, wifi, a schedule, hours in the day to work — all the while taking care of our wonderful (and at times, totally wild) 3-year-old girls.

It just feels like there's not space for it all.

So that's why this last week, we went to France.

LET'S GO TO FRANCE:

It doesn't sound like that's a natural conclusion to come to, but it felt like the right one.

Kelsey and Tyler (our bffs who we moved here with), were wanting to take one more trip before the kids start school, and they'd settled on southern France. We wavered — we'd be able to work better, we thought, if we stayed put in Spain. But the endless hours of trying to keep the girls occupied was driving us all a bit crazy. We decided a change of scenery would be good, and that keeping the girls occupied would be easier if they had friends to play with (and if I had friends to play with too! 🙂)

So, to France we went. Carl was able to take a day or two off and was definitely able to play with us over the weekend, and the rest of the time, he was working, I was with the girls.

We flew from Spain to Marseille, and then rented a car and drove to a little town about an hour from Marseille and stayed at a winery. Seriously. Think of the most beautiful winery you've seen, and then imagine an old house on the property — that's where we got to live for a few days. (Here's the Airbnb listing! So much more affordable than a bunch of hotel rooms since we had four adults and four kids all together!)

The first night, we sat out at a long table overlooking the vineyard and ate rotisserie chicken and grilled vegetables and crusty bread slathered in the most incredible butter I have ever experienced in my life. I ate like 5 pieces of bread.

We toasted with French wine, of course, and I was so glad to get to travel with our friend Tyler, because he's a total French wine buff. I got to just say, “I'll have what he's having!” at every turn.

The next morning, Kelsey and I drove into town to get some bread and pastries, and I WISH I'd taken a thousand pictures of the little boulengerie, but here's the Google listing for it. It was so small and charming and everything was DELICIOUS. We picked out a thousand things, it felt like, and I cringed a little bit as they prepared to tell us our total. But somehow, despite coming home with bags and bags of treats, we only spent 20 euro. Are you kidding me?! I wish I could go back this second.

We mostly ate our meals there at the chateau (House? Idk. It felt like a chateau so I don't know what else to call it!) — fresh melon and cured meats and cheese and more crusty bread, and definitely more butter. We spent some time down by the pool — the kids running around the outside and cannon-balling in. And after a few minutes of wandering around the property, Kelsey discovered a fig tree with perfectly ripe figs, and a lavender and rosemary bush which she immediately added to the cheeseboard she was making that afternoon.

What a DREAM.

OFF TO ANNECY:

Next, we headed to Annecy — which might just be the most beautiful place I've ever seen — or at least top 5.

It's about 45 minutes from Geneva, Switzerland, and the town is like the Venice of France. It winds in and out and around these beautiful canals, and then opens up to this exquisite lake that's surrounded by mountains.

One afternoon we hopped in the car and took the kids about 30 minutes to a beach on the lake. It was a municipal beach, totally not crowded, cost us like, maybe 3 euro total to get in, and it was just so peaceful and so much fun.

Carl had to work a lot of the time we were in Annecy, which meant I had extra time with the girls. To be honest, being by myself with the girls is pretty intimidating to me. Not when we're at home (at least not anymore, they used to definitely be a two person job) — but when we're out places, I just worry about things getting out of control. I worry that one is going to run one way, and the other is going to go the other way, and I'm going to lose one. (Any other moms worry about this?) They're both just such wildcards at this age.

But while we were in Annecy, something shifted in me. I obviously wasn't going to stay at home for three days straight because Carl couldn't go out, and so I ventured out with the girls. I was with Kelsey and Tyler and their boys, but also, there were times when I was with the girls by myself.

We drove to the lake that day without Carl, we walked home from the city center on our own (about 20 minutes), and we went grocery shopping — just the three of us.

I suddenly had this moment where I realized what was happening — that I was driving down the road in a place I've never been in a country where I used to speak the language but am really pretty rusty, and the craziest thing was, I wasn't scared!

I wasn't nervous, I wasn't anxious, I didn't even feel like I was really that far outside my comfort zone.

And seeing myself do something that previously would have sounded 1000000% impossible to me was this incredible reminder that even though it happens slowly and sometimes imperceptibly, we are growing, we are learning, we are getting better at things, our capacity is increasing.

I can do hard things. I can learn to do new things. I really can! Look how much I've changed!

That was a parenting milestone for me, and a life one too.

One of the things we really wanted to do while we were in France was to do a date night. Kelsey and Tyler's 10-year-anniversary happened while we were all in France, and ours was a few months ago on July 5th. (We were on the airplane flying from Chicago to Spain for our anniversary!)

So we traded off. One night while we were in Annecy, Kelsey and Tyler kept the girls — feeding them dinner and getting them to bed, and Carl and I explored the city a little bit. We went to dinner at a place called Le Chateau, and I got fondue (which I love) as we sat next to the canal and caught up with each other.

MARSEILLE:

After Annecy, we headed back south toward Marseille. We stayed in Le Beausette. It reminded me so much of California. We spent most of our time in the pool there. (I'm not going to link to the house, because while it was beautiful, it had a lot of bugs, and they didn't treat us super well.)

Kelsey and Tyler ventured out for a date, we visited as many patisseries and boulengeries as we could. (I wanted to try all the different treats I've only seen in pictures or on the Great British Baking Show Patisserie weeks.

On our last night, we went to Cassis, had dinner and drank Kir Royales (champagne with creme de cassis! When in Cassis, am I right?) while we looked out at the water.

After dinner, we walked down to the beach, and as the sun was going down, we all put our toes in — something I've gotten to do in so many different countries. It's this holy practice to me, and it was so special to get to invite the girls into it.

We finished out the night by going on the sweetest carousel. Somehow it was the first time the girls had ever gotten to do something like that. (How that's true, I have no idea. But it is!) And they LOVED it.

The entire thing was a dream… until the end.

THEN… WE ALMOST MISSED OUR FLIGHT HOME:

All week, Kelsey had been telling me about French skincare and how incredible it is. She also told me about how it's available in French pharmacies at a price that would be unheard of anywhere else. We hadn't had a chance to go during the week and so we decided we'd go on the way to the airport. We stopped at a random mall not far from the rental car place, Kelsey and I ran in, spent about 20 minutes picking out skincare (Thankfully, she'd done all the research beforehand so she knew what to get and what I'd like), and then we hopped in the car and headed for the airport.

We knew we were cutting it close-ish, but we thought, surely we'd be fine.

Turns out, not so fine. The lines took forever, every step of the process was a slog, and before we knew it, we were dangerously close to missing our flight.

Finally, Kelsey and I took the kids and left Carl and Tyler with our suitcases (which had to be put through a bag drop/security process of their own with a line that lasted FOREVER). The girls and I got through security just fine, but Kelsey got stopped — I quickly realized that the girls and I were the front of the pack and that if we had any chance of having them hold the flight for us, it was going to be because we sprinted.

“Guys, get in!” I yelled at the twins, they hopped in the stroller and then we made a break for it.

Because the lines were so long and so many passengers were still missing, the airplane doors hadn't closed yet, and so I arrived at the gate totally sweaty, fully panicked, and trying to explain in the most frantic, broken French that my husband and friends were still coming, and could they please wait?

They did — at least for Kelsey. And so Kels and I boarded the flight with our kids, feeling pretty positive that the guys and all of our luggage were going to be left behind.

You know how I said that France was a benchmark for me in a lot of ways? I got to see, “Oh wow, I really HAVE grown! As a mom, and as a person in general, I have more confidence, less fear, and more capacity to do things — even if they're things I haven't done before.”

Well, I got to see the same in my girls during this whole ordeal.

My three-year-old twins, who sometimes behave like three-year-olds, (melting down, throwing fits, you know, all the normal stuff), SNAPPED into action during all of this. They dutifully walked through the metal detectors in security, and as we got to the other side, they started helping me gather all of our stuff. They grabbed their backpacks, made sure we didn't forget a water bottle, and then jumped into the stroller, not pausing or complaining for even a second.

Again, my kids are helpful, they're so smart, they're absolutely wonderful human beings — but they also have moments where they choose to be totally unhelpful. This would have been a perfectly understandable moment for a meltdown, but instead, they rose to the occasion. I was SO proud.

Quinn even climbed the airplane stairs by herself — allowing a super kind guy in front of us to help her because I was holding Annie.

I am tearing up just thinking about it. My capacity has grown, and so has theirs. We can do hard things, and we can do them together. How COOL.

Finally, after a few long minutes of waiting and hoping, and frantically texting, “You guys, RUN” to both of our husbands, they burst through the airplane doors right as they were about to shut.

It was close, but we made it. And nobody is allowed to do the math on how much that extra stop for cheap French skincare almost cost us in replacement flights and hotels for the night. 🤪

Have you been to France? Any suggestions on where we should go next?