Hi guys! It’s been a while since I’ve written a family update, as the focus lately has been on travel and our recent trip back to South Africa. For those of you who have asked for the packing essentials for babies and toddlers article, I’ll get that live next week for you 🙂 It seems that tons of our friends are traveling with small children soon – super exciting!
Since we’ve gotten back home we’ve been absolutely loving life here. It was really important to me to introduce Hudson to his family and our special tribe of people in South Africa – I think it was something i needed to do before I could feel fully at peace being here in Canada.
What’s been happening?
We’ve managed to get into a nice routine at home and I’m finally getting the hang of this stay-at-home-mom thing. We have our days, but for the most part, the kids have been amazing and Summer has been such a princess and growing into a real well-mannered and kind girl. I cannot believe she will be THREE next month. Hudson is now three months which is also totally crazy – he’s the sweetest little guy and the perfect addition to our family.
*Day-to-day with my littles
*It took Summer under five minutes to turn the basement/ her play room upside down 😉
We’ve been busy doing lots around the city and making the most of Summer time – the Saskatoon EX was a highlight, and we went to our first birthday party over here for one of Summer’s little friends. Other firsts, was Summer attending her first dance class (super cute), and being babysat for her first time by good friends of ours’ children (who have recently completed their baby sitting certificates). The temperatures have been mostly high twenties and some very hot days, up to 39 degrees! I know we should never complain about the heat when in a few months we will be freezing 😉
*The Saskatoon EX (Exhibition) is an annual fun fair – Summer LOVED it!
*Summer’s first dance class
What’s about to happen?
Things are about to get busy for the last bit of the year… We are heading to Calgary on Monday for a road trip to attend our US visitors visa appointment (for Summer and myself). We will be road tripping (the total distance is around six hours), stopping for a night in Drumheller (Alberta) en route, and then heading into Calgary for two nights.
We will then wait until the visas come through, but the plan is to head to the States early in September as Adrian has quite a bit of work to do over there, and we are tagging along 🙂 I’m really excited to be visiting the States for the first time. We will most likely be starting with Washington state, Nevada, the Dakotas and Idaho on this trip.
Summer starts Preschool!
It’s been over eight months since Sum attended school, and many of you know how excited I’ve been for her to get started again. She has her preschool orientation day in two weeks where her and I attend class together so that the kids are eased into it slowly – I love that idea!
I’ve been so looking forward to her being able to socialize with other kids and have more structured crafts and learning time. Summer and I do crafts and learning time together at home but some days, if Hudson isn’t having a good day or if things are busy, it doesn’t always happen. So school will be amazing for her and I know how much she is going to love it (her favourite thing is crafts and art), as she’s so social and used to love her playschool in South Africa which we miss so so much.
We managed to find a preschool which allows children to attend more than twice per week. In this province, the norm for preschool is twice or at most three times per week. It’s very normal here and part of the culture. There seems to be a movement towards increasing that time spent at school in the preschool years, and this lovely school that we have found is adopting that mindset 🙂 At this preschool, we can choose our own days we’d like her to attend, and if we want her to do a morning or an afternoon session. We’ve decided to send her four times per week; two mornings and two afternoons, and have one family day where we don’t have to rush anywhere but can do a day outing or just have us time. Morning sessions are from 9:15 – 11:30am and afternoon sessions are from 1:15 – 3:30pm. Short I know! It’s all about embracing the culture here but I won’t lie, this has been hard to understand as it’s completely different to the education options or norms in South Africa. For those of you wondering what working moms do; you send your children to daycare, which has kids attending from around 8am – 5pm daily. It’s usually quite pricey.
We visited the school and met the teachers, saw the classroom and I knew instantly that this would be where Sum would be happy and would thrive. With her being our first child, she doesn’t get social interaction with kids her own age unless we are at a play date or a park with other kids or at community group etc. Many parents (some friends of ours), don’t send their kids to preschool or only send twice per week because it’s their second, third or fourth child; which makes total sense because their child is getting to socialize with their siblings 🙂 For Summer, this isn’t the case, and I can’t wait to see how she grows and learns in this group environment.
Our friend is coming!
Our precious friend Claire Pea arrives to visit us for a whole month early October, so we will be home from the States by then to welcome her. We will be touring around our city and doing life here for two weeks and then heading on the road again to Vancouver (probably via Calgary and Banff) for a work conference that Adrian will be attending in Vancouver. It will be so great for Claire to see more of Canada and for us to see Vancouver. I also have dear friends there who I grew up with in SA and cannot wait to see them (we are coming for you Lesur clan)! 😉
More travel 🙂
Adrian may need to go back to the States straight from Vancouver (it’s a 7 hour road trip), so we may be on the road for a while! Clearly we were called to be gypsies, or maybe pilgrims rather 😉 I’m not complaining though – life is an adventure and our family will go with the flow, and our kids will see the world from a young age. Blessed! This is the time to do this kind of thing as when Summer is settled in kindergarten it will be much harder to travel around as often. She will definitely be missing loads of preschool days, but school will be there when we are back… and she’s little!
We will be blogging about our adventures to come and sharing daily road trip and travel updates on instagram – @followthebergs. Thanks for joining us on the ride of our lives 😉 Stay tuned for more adventure 😉
Love,
The Bergs
Follow the Bergs 