4Globetrotters

By LineogJesper on August 29, 2015

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 Phillippines 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 wont 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 Phillippines 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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