A Kid's Journal to Encourage A Child to Write in a Second Language

We're raising our three Dutch boys bilingually, with the primary aim that they are comfortable speaking English with their British and American family. I am always on the look out for fun, interesting ways to encourage my sons to speak in English, listen to English or read English books. The biggest challenge however, is getting my nine year old to write in English. I was delighted when a great opportunity for him to practice his English penmanship fell into our laps.

I'm a fan of journaling for many reasons, and I believe it is a valuable tool for children as well as adults. The Time Capsule kid's journal turned out to be not only great fun and insightful, but a great way to get my eldest voluntarily writing in English. Without me pushing or nagging my son chose to write in his second language.

The Expat Activity Book by Jodi Harris - A Book Review

Twenty personal development exercises to get you thinking about the challenges, the growth moments, the gifts and the things you lose when you choose an expat life. That's what Jodi Harris's expat activity book (Amazon US link) is about in a nutshell.

Amazon UK Link

From 'The Hello Checklist' at the front of the book to 'The Goodbye Checklist' at the back, Jodi (World Tree Coaching) guides you through activities designed to get you thinking about who you are and how you can be your best self as an expat. 

The first exercise is designed to help expats plan for settling into a new home, whilst the second is a means of visualising how a new adventure will look. They are exercises specifically for expats making a transition. They are the kind of activities that would certainly provide me with support and direction if I was planning an international relocation. 

However, I'm not. At least not yet.

Why I Journal Our Decembers

Every year around this time I get ready to start a Christmas journal, more specifically a 'Tis the Season Gadanke journal. I usually get near to the end of November and then think about my Christmas journal, realise I don't have one and get one rushed to me just in time for 1st December.

This year I am prepared! I have this year's on the kitchen counter, ready to go and my eldest asked me yesterday what it was. I told him that I use it to record all the wonderful things we tend to do as a family during December; I write little notes, put photos in and record the details. It's become a tradition, and as my sons get older they'll add to it themselves.

"I've been doing one every year for the last few years. You can look at them later if you like," I told him. His eyes lit up.

"Really? That would be cool!" he said.

My children, as most children do I think, love looking at photos of themselves when they were little(r). And that's the moment when I remembered exactly why I spend time in December capturing both the special and the ordinary moments.

My boys are growing fast - the rolls of baby fat are long gone, the high chair has no place at our Christmas table anymore and whether Sinterklaas exists is now a question on my eldest child's lips. In short, every December we have together is different.

December is evolving as we grow as a family. One day our Decembers will look so different, one day when my children have families of their own. But meanwhile, these are our Decembers to share - and I'm making the most of them, every smile and squeal of joy.

December is a mad month, easily the busiest month of the year. First we have the build up to Sinterklaas arriving in the Netherlands (he gets here this Saturday) and as soon as he heads back to Spain with his helpers our attention turns full on to Christmas. December is a mad month - but also an incredibly wonderful one so capture it.

Every year I create our own advent calendar which comprises 24 envelopes with something sweet and edible and an activity which we then do that day. Because things at school are already hectic enough for my children I tend to go for quiet, calming activities during the week. Think things like a Christmas story by candlelight or simply eating by candlelight, or donating food to a local cause or making a present for a loved one. Other days we go to a Christmas market or fair or bake mince pies or pepernoten. This year a traditional, British pantomime will be on December's list (watch out for a future post on this!).

So, there are lots of moments to capture, lots of fun to record for later years, and lots of photos to take to remind us of precious times. Lot to be thankful and grateful for.

And on top of all that the Gadanke Christmas journals contain writing prompts that make me think about the smells, the sights, the sounds, the feelings of the festive season - and of course the tastes of December! And there are lots of other little bits and pieces which will make the creatives amongst you squeal with joy. Gadanke is also a great place to go for journaling inspiration, including workshops, prompts and ideas to spice up your pages.

Oh how I love December!

How do you capture your December memories? Do you journal at this time of year?

Stop. Pause. Journal. It's Summer Holiday & Expat Dilemma Time.

The summer break is coming up and that means exotic trips, palm trees and cocktails, plane journeys to far off places, lazy days on the beach soaking up the sun - or in our case cramming as much crap as we can get in the boot of the car and then squeezing three kids in the back seat hooked up to a DVD and Nintendo intravenous drip feed and heading off to Germany.

It's always hard to plan a summer break when you are an expat. On the one hand I want to see my friends and family who are back in Britain, on the other hand the world is a big place so heading back to the same town in the same country every year gets old when you have done it year after year. Nearly Irish sums it up beautifully in her post she added to the monthly #ExpatLifeLinky.

Since having children we have tried to combine a summer break with a visit to loved ones back in Blighty. We've been to Cornwall, England for the past three years so we thought we'd try somewhere else this year. It's a surprise for the boys what exactly we'll be doing - but I do know it will be lots of fun. But the new destination means skipping a trip to England. Living a life overseas makes vacation time a little more complicated - there's always a destination dilemma to deal with!

On the other hand, our unchartered destination this year, means I get to fill my "The Great Journey" travel journal with completely new things this summer. I have kept a memento of our holiday using Gadanke's crafted gem for a few years now - but last year I couldn't help but think that I had probably filled in the same details the year before....

But I won't be able to say the same this year! The journals are a great way of capturing the moments that make up a fantastic family vacation: the sights that mesmerise, the smells that overwhelm, the colours that fill your children with wonder, the new tastes they can't get enough of, the giggles you share as a family. There's room for photos and postcards, hiding places for those special museum tickets or train ticket stubs. It becomes a homemade time capsule to look back on with your children as they grow. These Gadanke journals give me my 'me moments' whilst away, my relaxation moments which allow me to be creative.

Keeping a travel journal whilst on holiday has become an obsession a habit I love. (If you love journaling too head over and take a peek at the many Gadanke free workshops for great tips and advice.) It makes me pause and take in the world around me, really soak up my new environment. And that is what a summer holiday is all about - stopping, pausing - wherever you head, whoever you spend it with. Right?

How do you record your summer holiday memories? Do you keep a travel journal? Turn your photos into a photo book? 

A Birthday (and a Giveaway) Fit for a Dutch King

Next week it's the king's birthday, the 27th April to be precise, and he's throwing a huge street party to which you are all invited.

The Dutch king's birthday celebrations certainly beat borrowing chairs from the neighbours to make a huge birthday circle in which to eat soggy crackers and drink coffee. His involve everyone dressing up in orange and hitting the Dutch streets - armed with as much crap from your house as you can physically carry in order to sell it from blankets on the pavements. Huh what? I hear you novices to King's Day cry. Yes really, all truth.

Of course the king himself doesn't take part in the vrijmarkten (although that would be rather amusing - him and the family sitting on a blanket selling the unwanted things from their royal residence and princess Amalia playing the flute and Maxima selling homemade cakes to earn a few cents) but he does throw toilets around. Again, yes, it's true, although in all fairness that was to celebrate his mother's birthday and not his own.

Let's face it King Willem-Alexander has the kind of birthday celebrations that are worth recording for prosperity and I have just the giveaway for him - an "It's My Birthday Journal" lovingly handmade by the award winning Gadanke.

It has room for the king to keep a birthday card from his mother (as in the woman formerly known as Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands) and those precious photos of the common folk taking to the nation's waterways in boats adorned in orange from head to toe.

There are embellishments fit for a king and an annual letter that Queen Maxima or one of his three daughters could write to him. There are writing prompts to help him review the year gone by, and a place to record the plans for the coming year - important whether you're king of the Netherlands or a regular person like you and me.

The journal is colorful, comes with a PDF document so that the number of birthdays you can record is endless, as well as 30 minutes of video tutorials full of inspiration and tips. In short, it's fabulous. And I have one to give away - to entrants worldwide. That's right, no matter where you live on the globe, whether in a palace or a humble abode, you can enter.

And so how do you get your hands on one of these wonderful Gadanke birthday journals? I figured I shouldn't enter my own giveaway - morally and ethically not done and all that - so there are three journals winging their way to me as I type and as it's my middle son's birthday next week we'll be getting to work as soon as it arrives! So you can either go order one or three like me, or you can enter to win one here on this blog!

If you, even if you are King Willem Alexander himself, want to win an It's My Birthday Gadanke journal use Rafflecopter below - there's no special treatment king or no king and you can enter until the very end of the Dutch king's birthday.

a Rafflecopter giveaway

Leave a King's Day or birthday related comment below for extra entries in the giveaway - I want to hear what you love about King's Day, your experience with the dreaded Dutch birthday circle or what you last took in as a traktatie. If it's birthday related, share it!

Good luck!

Expat Life: Loving and Leaving Where You Live

I have just finished reading Global Mama by Melissa Dalton-Bradford (you can find a review here) and all the way through the book I was struck by the sense of 'home'; her family's ability to set down roots wherever they ended up living. They didn't just live physically in new countries, new places, new houses; they lived with their heart and soul and I had the feeling that every place they left meant leaving a little part of themselves there. Truly global living.

Reading Dalton-Bradford's account of living in Norway and the cultural differences they experienced when the family made a move to Paris made me think about my own sense of home.

I take for granted now that I live in the Netherlands, that I live in a Dutch house, in a Dutch street surrounded by locals. But what does that actually mean? It's the little things around us that make somewhere unique to live. It's the secret corners, the special items of furniture or memorabilia that travel with us, it's the normality of our days in a place. It's the waves from neighbours, the familiar faces scraping ice from the cars parked in the street in winter.

As each day passes in a house, in a town, in a country we take everything around us more and more for granted. Nothing seems particularly special anymore because we see, touch or pass it every day. Only by leaving a place do we see it's true place in our heart. Only by moving on do we appreciate all the little things that make a place special, make a place our home. And when you are not constantly on the move it is easy to forget all that.

Reading Global Mom reminded me that I was busy with a Love Where We Live journal at one point but never finished capturing the place I call home. A journal about where you live is never really finished of course - things change, you redecorate, you renew, you refresh rooms - and more importantly every day you live in a home you make new memories. But I was busy capturing the essence of the place I call home. I was busy with photos of the room we gather to eat, where we scrub our teeth, where the children play.

What makes a home a real home though is not the wallpaper, the curtains you've meticulously chosen to match the sofa, nor the well thought out shade of the woodwork's paint, but the people you share your home with.

Home is made special by the things you do together - the Friday night rituals, the lazy Sunday morning breakfasts, the ordinariness of the morning rush out of the front door. What do festive holidays look like in your home? How would all that change if you lived somewhere else? Expat life is certainly about change - from the minor to the major, from the little day to day things to life changing events. And in all that our home is the foundation, it holds things that are familiar and dear to us. It holds things that capture our memories, whether we realise it or not.

There are things scattered around my Dutch home that I brought with me from England and every time they catch my eye I am cast back to a previous life, even if for only a brief moment.

There are even special memories in the choosing of a house - the memories of picking the house that we currently live in have emotions intrinsically entwined around them. We bought a home for our future. We bought a place we could make our own, put our stamp on. Then, back in 2002, there were two of us. Now there are five of us. We have grown our family in this house. As my Love Where We Live journal reminds me the house I live in, the place I call home is special because:

"We are growing into beautiful people here."

Each day we are growing as a family, and this home is the place where my three sons have grown from babies into toddlers and are growing into school-going boys. It's their base, the place they feel safe and secure. And whilst I was reading Global Mom, it became clear to me that this house we live in is a shell for our family, for our lives, but what goes on inside will be the same wherever we should lay down roots, whichever house, street, town or country we should live in. We will take something of this place with us when we eventually move, not the physical stuff, but the emotional and cultural parts of life here in the Netherlands.

Moving away from this Dutch street, this town, or even this country wouldn't take away the memories, the love that has encased us in our home over the last twelve years, the people we have become living our Dutch life.

Imagine tomorrow having to leave the place you currently call home -  what little part of you would you leave behind? What would you take with you from the life you have lead there to your new home?

It strikes me that the furniture would all be replaceable, there'd be no tears shed about leaving the carpets we spent time deliberating over behind, but the moments we have spent getting on with life in our home would be irreplaceable, unique. These moments are currently the daily occurrences that seem so average, so ordinary and uninteresting -  the day to day that hardly seems worth noting in a beautiful journal. But I am off to do just that - because I know one day I will realise the value of all these family moments that make up day to day life in our average Dutch home in a Dutch street, in the middle of the Netherlands. I will come to realise that we have lived in this house with our hearts and our souls. And I will also realise that we will leave a little of ourselves in this home when we leave it.

Journaling the Magic of an Expat December

As regular readers will know, I have long been an advocate of journaling, and in particular a fan of Gadanke journals. Now that December is underway, my Joy to the World Christmas journal is in daily use for the third year running. Can you imagine the fun we'll have in years to come when my three little boys are (I almost don't want to think about it) teenagers and we look back on the Christmas celebrations captured in the journals?

As expat adults we most likely celebrate the festive period a little differently now than when we were children. I know I do. We expats now live in a different country than the one we lived in as a child. Some of us have a family from a different cultural background to our own. We may even celebrate different holidays to the ones we did when whilst we were growing up.

We expats also go to great lengths to recreate the holidays we know and love when we are living overseas - even if it means scouring the land for an expat shop that stocks a jar of Robertson's mincemeat to make mince pies, begging family to send Christmas puddings through the post or being very creative with substitutes.

And the way we celebrate this year may well look very different next year, or in a few years time. So, I'm all for capturing moments, taking a snapshot of how things are now as a keepsake for the future.

I for one had never even heard of Sinterklaas and pakjesavond on the 5th December until 2000 when I moved to the Netherlands. Capturing my adult experiences of a childhood celebration that was not part of my childhood is something special.

The joy on my children's faces as Sinterklaas arrives in the Netherlands on Pakjesboot 12 in November is something I want to capture for the years ahead when they no longer believe. The excitement during the build up to the big celebration on the 5th December is something I want to hold tight, remember in the years to come. So I use my 'Tis the Season to record our family celebration of Sinterklaas, and once he gets back on the boat to Spain, I switch to Christmas mode.

Christmas. A festive celebration I know how to do. Back on familiar ground. Every day in December we do something special as a lead up to the 25th, advent envelopes with activities in that mean something to us as family. And I keep the cards in the journal, as well as photos of the activities and little notes.

The wonderful thing about Gadanke journals is that there are smatterings of hints and prompts to get me thinking about all the senses and how Christmas impacts on them: the smell of Christmas pudding, the bangs from the Christmas crackers, the scrunching of wrapping paper, the feel of little arms wrapped around my neck as we read a Christmas story by candlelight.

Journaling is also a great creative outlet - giving me the time I need to just sit quietly and reflect. December is magical, and short of being able to bottle that magic, I capture it all with my 'Tis the Season journal instead. You know, I think December may well be my favourite month of the year!

Tip: These journals make amazing, thoughtful and original presents for loved ones, including your children.

Do you keep a journal? How do you capture memories to look back on in the years to come?

*All links to Gadanke are affiliate links, which means if you click through and become the owner of a beautiful Gadanke journal I earn a few pennies too.* 

Perfect Gifts to Capture Your Expat Stories

Sometimes you find a product you love so much you need to shout about it - and that's why I'm putting Gadanke journals in the spotlight. It's that time of the year when we're all looking for those perfect Christmas gifts and Gadanke products are very special indeed. Gadanke is an award winning handmade journal shop using eco-friendly materials. That's it in a nutshell, but there's oh so much more.

The Story Behind Gadanke

The story of how Gadanke came about is wonderful, the idea behind the journals is heart tingling and the journals themselves are awesome.

The Expat Bit

Katie Clemons is the face behind Gadanke, (which comes from the German word for idea or thought). Whilst living in Berlin with her German husband she crafted her first journal.

And here's another awesome bit: Katie now lives in a converted airplane hangar in the Rocky Mountains in the US, having just moved out of a tire house. You can follow the couple's creation of and move into their dream home via Katie's Making This Home blog.

But what I like best of all is that Katie's journals are more than pieces of paper strung together so that she can make a living. To Katie, it's much, much more and that is so evident in the pieces she handcrafts. She doesn't just make and sell journals, she prompts journal owners to celebrate their story, to get memories down on paper, to record the past for the future. In her own words,

"I believe story is power. It enriches our lives, challenges us to dream bigger, and strengthens future generations."

Katie has a Facebook page where she regularly poses questions that often make me stop what I am doing to cast my mind back. Here's an example:

"You and I are 10 years old. It snowed 12", and now we've got the whole day to play. What should we do?"

Where do you go when you think about the answer to that question? I was instantly taken back to my childhood days with my younger brother wrapped up in winter coats, woolly hats, scarves and gloves, playing in the garden trying to make a snowman. We'd beg and forage for all the bits we could use for the snowman's eyes, nose, arms...... I hadn't been to that place for a long time! It was so great to pause and rewind to the past.

Gadanke Journals

Gadanke journals are made predominantly from recycled papers and contain not only writing prompts but embellishments such as tags, little envelopes or library cards, stickers or carnival tickets. The themed journals make the perfect gift for expats.


Take the "Love where we Live" journal. Many expats move from place to place and this journal helps expats capture the essence of the place they call home. Not just bricks and mortar but what makes the town you live in tick? How does it smell? What happens there? What does the room you play in look like? Capture it. Record it. Celebrate it. When your expat adventures are over you'll have a collection of stories and memories to treasure and share with your children and their children.

What Expat Stories Have you got to Share?

Stories about expat life cry out to be captured, as Katie so wonderfully sums up,

"As expats, we're venturing into this all-new territory. Even the simplest things like grabbing a few towels at the store becomes a challenge because first you have to figure out which store sells towels! You can have the funniest experiences as well as the most frustrating. I still remember my classmates in language class pronouncing my name "Kevin"! But how much of these stories would you and I remember if we didn't pause to document them? I think that it's so important for an expat to journal. Trust me. It helps you work through your experiences. It helps you celebrate them! So many former expats have told me, "I wish I'd written that down. I wish I could remember how I felt and what it was like."

Your story matters. This adventure you're navigating through matters."

And I couldn't agree more.

I haven't even gotten round to mentioning the baby and wedding journals, kids' journals and the journal to help you find direction, to capture your travel adventures, the mother and son or daughter journals, to record recipes.... phew, you know what there are so many more why don't you head over to Gadanke and check it out for yourself.

Links to Gadanke are affiliate links.*

What I Learnt Taking Part in NaNoWriMo

Regular readers will know that during November I've been taking part in NaNoWriMo - in essence writing a 50000 word novel. And I'm pleased to say that I did it! I signed up on a whim thanks to Nomad Mom Diary, and even though I was determined to give it a go, I wasn't wholly convinced I would get 50000 words together on the topic of my expat life. The elation when the word count ticked over from 49999 wasn't as high as I had imagined it would be back on November 1st. For two reasons.

Firstly, there is lots more writing to do and it still needs an awful lot of editing and crafting to create a novel that I would be happy for any one of you to read. Despite working for many hours, it really is a long way from being a finished product. Some of you have asked 'when will we get to read it?'. I'm guessing about 2020…..

Secondly, the 50900 words I have written so far were hard. Not as in a struggle to get words on paper, but an emotional struggle to relive events of the past and get them written. My life has been pretty uneventful, nothing out of the ordinary, no extreme events that warrant a best selling book. I had a happy childhood, I went to university, spent a year in Toulouse, messed around for a bit retrying to deicide what I wanted to do with my life, decided on a career in Human Resources, met a Dutch man and moved to the Netherlands and had three sons. That's it in a nutshell.

Photo Credit: Pear38

As I was writing some parts of those 50000 words doubts took over - was there really a book here to write? But I kept going, because even if there is nothing I have written over the course of November that is worthy of gracing the pages of a published book it was actually a therapeutic exercise. I have realised that there are some events in my forty years of life that have happened which I haven't put to rest, I haven't given it 'closure' as the Americans put so well. Taking part in NaNoWriMo forced me to confront some ghosts, brought emotions to the forefront that I didn't realise I still had about things I have been through. I felt anger, hurt, sadness, regret, happiness and joy whilst writing. I have had tears streaming down my face whilst typing. Life is very much about the details and not what you can wrap up in a nutshell. It's about the emotions. It's about the relationships.

Some of what I have written will never see the light of day - that would be unfair to loved ones - but the act of writing about some things was enough reward in itself in some cases. Writing about some events made me feel like it had just happened, all over again, and I found myself feeling furious at some people in my life. It really has been a tough writing journey. And it made me think over and over about the words from writer Jo Parfitt about your best writing coming from writing from a place of pain. Truer words have not been uttered! Raw emotion makes for good writing.

My memory databanks have been working overtime during November. One memory has sparked another and I have been amazed by the depth at which some things were buried. NaNoWriMo pulled them all out to the surface, things I haven't thought about for years.

I have also been incredibly grateful during this last month for the journals I have written over the years. There are gaps in my memories, or things were not as I remember them. Or I have long forgotten the details. Rereading my journals helped me get right back inside the moments of my past. I have relived happy and sad times through my journal writing. It spurred me on to get back to writing in my journals more in the present. I have been seriously neglecting them over the last year and I have vowed to correct that. Every day there are moments worth writing about - things that seem so mundane and uninteresting yet in five years time they will be confined only to our memories. Our routines change, our daily lives evolve with the months and we won't remember how our days looked when we look back in a year. Yes, seems like I am back to that theme of capturing the moments…..

Why We Should Tell Our Children Expat Tales

A love story with a trailer
Photo Credit:Michal Zacharzewski SXC

My eldest son is at the age where he has started asking lots of questions about my past, about how life was in England, how I met his father and how I came to the Netherlands. It's a fabulous period of curiosity but also a great reminder for me and my husband of how far we've come. The details of exactly how we met (online in a chatroom) don't really make any sense for him yet (it's something we still find hard to believe looking back so we certainly can't expect a six year old to wrap his head around it) but the story of his papa coming to England by boat with a borrowed Dutch police trailer to collect his mama and all her belongings falls on eager, listening ears time after time. And we love telling the story.

There's nothing traditional about how I came to meet a Dutchman, sell up my flat in Watford, England and move to the Netherlands to make a new life and so it makes for some awesome story telling for our curious children at the stage where they want to know everything that happened before they arrived on the scene.

Last week, a great blog post by Drie Culturen asked whether there was a difference between children and adults living abroad.  In the post, Janneke argues that there is a big difference, namely because adults living abroad have already formed their own identity but a child's identity is still evolving. Whilst she talks about children from the point of view of them growing up abroad her tips are still relevant for those of us raising children in a country where they are native but we, as a parent, are not. She talks about helping children to form their own identity by telling stories about their heritage. She says tell your children stories about their grandparents. I couldn't agree more. And I would also add tell them about your own life back in your home country, about growing up in another country. Tell them their parent's love story. Tell them their birth story. Tell them every story you can think of about their family.

Not all stories need come from books. Share your
family stories with your children
Photo Credit: Patrick Nijhuis

Not only does it help mould their identity, it turns out that story telling is good for their memory too!  An excellent article called "The Stories That Bind Us" in the New York Times about research undertaken to find out whether children that knew more about their past faced adversity better than children with less knowledge about their family's past states,

"The more children knew about their family’s history, the stronger their sense of control over their lives, the higher their self-esteem and the more successfully they believed their families functioned."

That's quite something - research showed that children who have a good knowledge of their own family and past functioned better in challenging situations. Brian Gresko followed this topic up in an article and wrote,

"Storytelling has benefits beyond entertainment, which explains why humans have been telling stories for as long as we know. It’s one of the elements that makes us human, I think.........Having a shared story, a shared collection of memories, is a powerful unifying force between people – whether those stories be ones we tell as a nation, an ethnic group, a workforce, or a family."

And as expats, we have some amazing stories to tell our children.... so what are you waiting for? Share those stories today!

What stories do you tell your children about the country you were born in? What stories do you tell about grandparents and your brothers and sisters growing up? I would love to hear your stories!