Going on a 6,5 month trip around the world with two boys age 5 and 3 can obviously make you worry about lots of stuff. Will they get sick, will they like it, can we even stand being together 24-7 for so long without going crazy and will we miss sending them to daycare after a month.
Really you just have to accept that probably all of the above will happen at some point and that it is not going to be all fun and enjoyment. Probably we will find ourselves in some place far away from everything having eaten some food that might be fine for locals but that we simply cannot handle. The main thing is to avoid things like dengue and malaria since they can potentially ruin a big part of the trip. Fortunately there are good mosquito repellents and though they are talking about an epidemic like outbreak of dengue the risk is fortunately still very low.
One thing we do however worry about is how our 5 year old Noah is going to handle the trip. He is very social and being 5 the games he plays with his friends are becoming quite advanced. They are far beyond just driving around cars on the floor, making puzzles or running from one place to another which can satisfy our youngest Vitus (almost 3). Looking at our travel route we found that most children in the Philippines learn English from a young age and that the same is naturally true for Australia, Hawaii and USA (yes we know that Hawaii is part of the states too :-) ). So basically the idea became that if we could teach him enough English from home to start interacting with other children in that language he would be much more likely to find friends and also pick up much more English along the way.
We have used a few strategies and together they seem to be working very well. First of all Noah loves building LEGO and gladly spends hours going through step by step on quite complicated models (rated age 9-14 but naturally they do that to make parents feel good :-) ). We often sit down with him to enjoy some time together and for the last 2 month we have simply made it a principle that everything is done in English and we try to keep as much as the conversation as we can in English when we are eating dinner. It is amazing how quickly they pick up a language at that age and though he is far from fluent we are quite confident that he will pick up enough to be able to play much more with the children we meet on our journey.
Also we have found an app called "Fun English" which has helped him quickly learn the basic things like Colours, names of things in the house, food, fruits, animals and that kind of stuff.
Fortunately the boys won't have to do without Danish company for the entire trip. Of course they have each other but also Jesper's sister Anne and her son Alexander (6) will be visiting us in the Philippines for 8 days December 27. to January 4. Also (by coincidence) another family (Janne, Peter, Emil and Anton) from their daycare will be visiting Australia at the same time as us. Emil (5) and Anton (3) are almost exactly the same ages as Noah and Vitus and we are sure they all look very much forward to meeting good friends on the other side of the world (that goes for the adults too :-) ).
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