How To Tell The Kids

This evening we have had an initial conversation with our eldest daughter about the idea of our round the world trip.

I definitely want both kids to be involved in the planning of our trip, but I am also conscious that our departure is still roughly one year away, which will feel like an eternity to them. However, it was probably inevitable that it wouldn’t take Kiera long to grasp that Mum and Dad were cooking up something, so tonight we had a proper chat about the idea.

Kiera’s initial reaction was, thankfully, very positive.

What we will do about school figured highly in Kiera’s list of questions, quickly followed by how cool the idea of home-schooling seemed, so that by the end of this evening we had got to ‘what will happen if I don’t ever want to go back to school’.

The next major source of questions was what we would do with our house (sell it); our stuff (sell or store); our pets (find somebody very kind to look after them). Even the idea of needing to have some jabs to visit certain countries didn’t seem to dim the initial enthusiasm, although the idea of long plane journeys isn’t so popular at the moment.

Ultimately, the main driving force behind this trip is the idea of doing something interesting and exciting as a family, but with the emphasis being that we will go through this whole experience together. So I am thrilled that Kiera will be helping with the planning and is as excited as we are.

It won’t be long before we talk to our youngest daughter also (Alexandra – 4), but there really will be no coming back from that discussion, because once Lexi knows then so too will everybody that she meets for the next year!