Current Collection — Taking Route

Choose Your Own Adventure

The doorbell rang while I was prepping the dining room table to get started with homeschool. When I opened the door, I found a Hello Fresh box sitting on my doorstep. I wasn’t a subscriber to Hello Fresh, but this was the second time someone’s box had accidentally been delivered to me. I picked up the box and carried it into the kitchen, contemplating what to do with it.

I could open it and enjoy it myself. After all, it wasn’t my fault it showed up here. But before I cut the box open, I decided to look up the address. The blue GPS line meandered its way to the destination and calculated the distance. The house was just one street over.

I sighed as I looked at the box of ingredients, knowing what needed to be done. I slipped my shoes on, scooped the box into my arms, and made my way to the neighbor’s house.

Current Collection, Culture Shock and StressAlicia BoyceApril 17, 2023Comment

A Little Bit Far From Home

We started around the corner of West and Hortense. There’s a eucalyptus tree I've walked past hundreds of times. As if by instinct, I looked up at it as we passed. It danced with the wind against the bright blue sky the way it always does on afternoons in Southern California. The air smelled like fall, like back-to-school mornings, and trick-or-treat nights. The setting sun beat through the magnolia trees, the freshly mowed lawns smelled only the way freshly mowed lawns can, and school bells rang their afternoon song. Suddenly, I was back—walking to school with friends, coming too fast down the street corners on my razor scooter, getting nervous when we passed the cute boy’s house on family walks after dinner.

Current Collection, Home & HospitalityTaylor MayApril 17, 2023 Comment

Marriage Lessons from Our Life Overseas

My husband and I celebrated our wedding ceremony in the Dominican Republic, where I am from. Several hours later, we jumped on an airplane that would take us to Florida.

Wait, what? Isn’t the DR the perfect place to honeymoon? It is, it is. But, we were getting married through the fiancé visa, and the marriage license had to be signed in the States for us to be legally married. So, we arrived in Florida and spent our wedding night in separate bedrooms because my dad had been clear we couldn’t live together until the license was signed. (Don’t say it—I know what you are thinking).

Current Collection, Family & TCKsAylin MerckApril 17, 2023Comment

Hamburger Helper: Hold the Beef

Current Collection, RecipesCaroline EllisApril 17, 2023Comment

The Eras Tour (An Expat's Version)

I’m six years into living overseas, and I can already see so many distinct seasons that have shaped our time here. How we’re spending our daily lives and who we’re doing it alongside now looks completely different than even just three years ago, despite having lived in the same neighborhood and worked at the same school our entire time here.

Current Collection, Life Lessons LearnedCaroline SwartzApril 17, 2023Comment

What Makes a House a Home?

I sat on my couch, sipping coffee, looking at a photograph of our recent trip to Colorado displayed on our smart TV. The Indie folk I started listening to while living abroad was humming along in the background.

It had been a year and a half since we stepped back on American soil. I still remember the mugginess I felt as we walked off the plane and into the jetway. It was quite different from the crisp, fall, morning air that greeted us in 2018 when we landed in Munich, Germany.

Our time abroad was officially over and the heartache of leaving a place that quickly became home began to set in.

Current Collection, Home & HospitalityGuest WriterApril 17, 2023Comment

Permission to Pivot

I really wanted to hate it. And in an embarrassing admission of my own pride, I wanted my kids to hate it too.

When we finished the tour of the school that day, I didn’t hate it, and neither did my kids. In fact, we loved it. We all agreed it was our next right choice.

Sending my kids to international school was not on my radar. We started out our expat adventure in a corner of the world where homeschooling was our only viable option, and because we loved it, I assumed we would never entertain another route. Then, as people like us do, we moved. We found ourselves in a place with more options and in a season of our kids having different needs.

Current Collection, Family & TCKsGuest WriterApril 17, 2023Comment

Climbing Above

It was barely dawn when my eyes opened, yet I was fully awake. My long week—intensified by the mounting heat and humidity of the rainy season—had left me completely exhausted, and I hadn’t slept well. It wasn’t yet 6:30 a.m., and the air around me was already sticky and hot. Realizing the likelihood of falling back asleep was low, I rolled my eyes and flopped out of bed.

Current Collection, Life Lessons Learned, Culture Shock and StressGuest WriterApril 17, 2023Comment

Compassion Fatigue

“Is he ok? Are you ok?”

My friend’s message surprised me. She had innocently asked how my day was going and I told her how our neighbor was attacked with a bush knife while coming home by public bus. Was I ok? Not really—and yet, somehow I was.

I think at times my abnormal life becomes so “normal” I no longer take time to process traumatic events. Being woken up by the cries of my sister-in-law telling the story of how thugs stopped the bus our neighbor was on and how he was attacked in the process was, of course, an unsettling way to start the day.

Current Collection, Culture Shock and StressGuest WriterApril 17, 2023Comment

Romanticize Your (Expat) Life

One of the expat influencers I follow on Instagram, Cecilia, lives on Svalbard—an island close to the North Pole. As you can imagine, it’s cold there. The extremely low daily temperature features heavily in this influencer’s stories. On Svalbard, there are no trees. The land is frozen tundra—permafrost—so there are no gardens. The sun shines twenty-four hours a day through the summer, but the high is only six degrees celsius. They call that the Polar Day. And in the winter, Svalbard experiences four months of complete darkness, called the Polar Night, and even longer without actually seeing the sun. It’s fun that Svalbard claims to be Santa Claus’ home, but it is literally the last place on earth I even want to visit, much less live.

Culture Shock and Stress, Current CollectionRosalie DuryeeApril 17, 2023 Comment

How One Mom Helped Her Struggling TCK

I remember holding my kindergarten class picture while snuggling with my mom one night at bedtime. She pointed at each face and asked me to tell her something about that kid. Was he kind or funny? Was that girl a good friend? We still have inside jokes that came out of that conversation, like the classmate I said was nice, "but…he farts." We've laughed a lot about that description over the years. We certainly did that night.

Looking back, I realize she had so much to do in the evenings—she was a full-time working mother with a husband and two kids. But I never felt that she was looking at the clock. She had time for me. She wanted to know what's going on in my world, and what I thought about it.

Expat Life is a Pair of Ducks

When I initially went overseas, I committed to one year and was sent as an intern with my company. By the end of my third year, I had committed to staying in my role long term and finally had the time to attend a training for people preparing to move overseas in Colorado during the summer of 2015. It was there that I first learned about “yay ducks” and the “yuck ducks.”

The trainers brought out two rubber ducks. (If you say, “pair of ducks” quickly, it kind of sounds like “paradox.”) The Yay Duck represented all the good and exciting parts of moving overseas. The Yuck Duck had some bruises and band-aids and represented all of the not-so-good parts of moving overseas. This was a new way to describe some of the feelings I was experiencing, as I looked ahead to making a major life transition.

Family & TCKs, Current Collection, Moving AbroadMallory BrooksJanuary 31, 2020expat life, transition, grief and joy, movingComment

Expat Motherhood—The Long View

Family & TCKs, Current CollectionJulie MartinezJune 27, 2019graceful motherhood, launching tcks, motherhood, parenting, raising tcks, TCK Issues, TCK life, TCKs Comments

Resurfacing Trauma, Raising TCKs, and Rekindling Joy

Early in my twenties, I married a grounded and reliable man who shared my growing faith. We bought a house, brought two children into the world, and started to put down our roots. But despite my desire for roots and security, our family was meant for a big international move. We knew this also meant lots of goodbyes, paring down favorite things, and sleeping in unfamiliar homes. Here we had worked so hard to build a life of constancy for our children, and now we were dragging them all over the country and then across the world, away from everything they had known. It was difficult for me, watching my children struggle with all the uncertainty. I wanted to create a life where they felt safe and secure – something far different than the life of loss and abandonment I had experienced in my own childhood.