Twelve Feet, Six Continents, One Year

Can you tell that we're smiling? We went on a date to a store (Tesco) that resembled Target in its scope. I'm not very good at adapting. I think I've written before about the fact that when I have a plan in mind, it's very hard for me to let go. Professionally, it's taken me a long time and a lot of effort to learn to understand that my own ideas aren't the only and certainly not necessarily best way to go about something. I wasn't a very good or valuable colleague until I figured that out. The same is basically true for me as a spouse/partner. I have concrete memories of fights from previous relationships that centered on the fact that I believed I had the right to say "no" definitively and end the conversation there. I had a lot of growth ahead of me in those moments. Approaching this trip, I knew I was going to struggle with this issue. I knew things were going to go wrong or at least awry. I knew that it was my number one goal to demonstr...

Okay. Take a deep breath. (Unless you assume the face mask on the person next to you is to protect you from them instead of them from you.) It's February 28th and the news of a flulike disease has been spreading faster than the disease itself for more than a month now. I want to write about this at length, in part to document my feelings at this particular moment in time but also to communicate those feelings to spectators who express their concern and curiosity to us on a regular basis. First, please understand that my viewpoint is cynical. Since the beginning of time, news media in any form has had a singular motive: sell. Journalist friends and friends of journalism: I do not speak ill of thee. But if you go to the New York Times website, there has been a flashing red box for weeks announcing breaking news on the subject. Sometimes there is something new to report but mostly there is just a new derivative of the same limited information. But sell, sell, sell means headlines ...

Here's our hotel room on a recent night-before-departure. This is hard for me to say but I made a mistake. I don’t even remember how or, specifically, why I made it. Fortunately, it hasn’t been hard to remedy. All I had to do was write two emails that included the word “cancel.” Here’s the rest of the story. When we left the US on November 1, we had plans for everything up to March 14th, when a plane would carry us from Mauritius to Johannesberg, South Africa. We had booked a tour of Cambodia and Vietnam for three weeks in late February and early March. We had booked a resort for four nights in Mauritius because it turns out that it’s one of the ways you can fly from SE Asia to South Africa. We had booked a crazy “transit hotel” in the Singapore airport for an overnight layover between a flight from Hanoi and a flight to Mauritius. It was all nailed down. I felt pretty good that this was a fair balance. We had done four months of domestic travel and we had planned fo...

Since most of our peers in the US are on winter vacation and marking the halfway point in the school year, let’s take a moment to make a close examination of our homeschooling effort to date. Part One: Fall Semester Timeline: In May, just a few weeks before we were set to leave, we had exactly zero idea how we were going to homeschool. We figured we had two months, July and August, in Minnesota to figure it out. Enter the Dustin of Destiny, husband of Lily’s softball coach and teacher at Summit Learning Charter, a mostly-online charter school based outside Portland. Truly, this was a miracle! Our enrollment with Summit gave us access to innumerable resources including living, breathing teachers and other education professionals. It also meant that because Summit receives our tax dollars that we receive a credit for buying curriculum materials through two catalogs. Lily, being a sixth grader, would have online classes that she didn’t have to do in real time, which was essential giv...

This isn't a fun or beautiful travelog post. It's my unloading about what I see as a necessary evil of family travel: the tablet. As we prepare for a 14-hour flight from Santiago to Sydney, I can't imagine traveling without one tablet per kid. When the kids come home exhausted from an amazing day of activity, I'm happy we can reward them with their screen time. When they need a motivation to push through a tough patch of school, it's awesome that the tablet is such a powerful incentive. But when it's time to put the tablets down so that we can go to dinner, for example, it's agony. When we're doing something - anything - and one asks (repeatedly), "can I have tablet time when we get home?", it's agony. It's a fight we're really tired of fighting. These devices are miraculous. We have Kindle Fires. We have one per kid. When we received them for Christmas last year, we installed screen covers and protective cases. They also rece...