future plans

Thoughts on 40

Thoughts on 40

Sarah Bringhurst Familia

I have been thinking about this impending birthday for quite awhile. I’m not sure why 40 is the age that’s really making me take stock of my life. I looked back at a few blog posts around when I turned 30, and apparently that was just another birthday, and didn’t even merit a mention. Maybe it’s because I was in the thick of raising small children (and goats and chickens), and just generally recovering from the Great Recession and the mess it had made of our business and our move to Italy. I was dealing with too many external crises to manage an internal one too.… Read more

Places I’ve Planned to Live

Places I’ve Planned to Live

Sarah Bringhurst Familia

When we were planning family trips as a kid, my mom used to tell me that anticipation is half the fun. It seems I took it to heart. Perhaps a little too much to heart. Tony and I have moved a lot of places since we got married fifteen years ago. But we have planned even more moves than we have executed, in varying levels of depth, up to and including consulting Google Maps street view to check out various prospective neighbourhoods.

Planning to move somewhere is a sort of reflexive impulse for us. We do it when we are feeling frustrated about the weather, the culture, the food, our jobs, or anything else about where we live now.… Read more

Grad School at 40

Grad School at 40

Sarah Bringhurst Familia

OK, technically I recently turned 39. But 40 sounds so much older, doesn’t it? It definitely sounded ancient to me when I graduated for the first time a million years ago at the ripe young age of 21. I do remember seeing a few “nontraditional” students in my classes back then. There was the nice older woman with my grandma’s haircut who sat next to me in history, and the tall Sikh man in philosophy with the salt and pepper beard. People who were obviously in a different stage of life from the rest of us. Now, unaccountably, I am about to become one of those people.… Read more

Amsterdam Middelbare Lottery, 2nd Time Around

Amsterdam Middelbare Lottery, 2nd Time Around

Sarah Bringhurst Familia

Yesterday our family had its second chance to participate in the great Amsterdam Middle/High School Lottery. Raj’s list of schools ended up being fairly similar to Axa’s, with a few tweaks. Here it is, straight off the link they sent us with instructions to check it at exactly 15:30 on April 4 to find out what his lottery number would be, and in which school he would be placed:

I fully expected that when we clicked the link at exactly 15:30 on April 4 along with the parents of 7580 other anxious Amsterdam pre-teens, the server would inevitably be down.… Read more

A Long-Held Dream

A Long-Held Dream

Sarah Bringhurst Familia

Eighteen years ago I graduated from university. I had been thinking about grad school for years already by then, but looking back I realise I never considered it a real option for me. My parents had been fully supportive of me getting a bachelor’s degree, but as devout, traditional Mormons, their script for their oldest daughter after university continued in a fixed path towards mission, marriage and motherhood. Not all Mormons uniformly believe this way (and some are much more extreme, as Tara Westover recounts in her riveting memoir, Educated), but my parents did, and for them it was core to their faith.… Read more

Choosing a High School in Amsterdam, Part 2

Choosing a High School in Amsterdam, Part 2

Sarah Bringhurst Familia

See also Part 1 and Part 3

We visited a couple more schools with Axa this week. By now we pretty much have the drill down (and she knows to keep her eyes out for where they have the cookies). I am starting to feel more confident about the process, and a bit less shell-shocked. After all, at the end of the day she just writes down all her choices and then we wait for the lottery. And none of my agonising or nit-picking about this or that advantage of this or that school will make much of a difference, if at all.… Read more

Our Family Christmas Letter (+ a Destination Change)

Sarah Bringhurst Familia

If you are Facebook friends with me or on our woefully outdated Christmas email list, this may be the second or third time you’ve seen this. But if you missed it, here’s 2014 in a nutshell:

Dear friends and family,

It’s been another year in Florida. Probably the most exciting thing we did was get out and actually see some Florida landmarks. At the beginning of the year we visited St. Augustine, which locals like to call the oldest city in the U.S, although Wikipedia uses rather more adjectives to define it precisely as “the oldest continuously inhabited European-established settlement in the Continental United States.”
… Read more
Planning an International Move

Planning an International Move

Sarah Bringhurst Familia

Stock MonkeysYou’d think planning for an international move would be old hat for me since we’ve done it so many times. Unfortunately, we actually haven’t done it that much. The planning, that is, not the moving. We’ve moved plenty, but it’s mostly been on the spur of the moment, and after a mad few weeks of planning. The last time we really took a long time to plan was nine years ago, before we went to the Philippines for the summer. If you’ve read my book, you’ll remember that despite the exhaustive planning, we were such rookie travelers we ended up in the airport with no money and no place to stay, after having spent all 13.5 of the 14 hours on the plane with tomato juice all over my white pantsuit.… Read more

Expatting Again

Expatting Again

Sarah Bringhurst Familia

Well, while we’re on the subject of announcing major life changes, I should probably let you in on where we’ll be moving next. Hint: our destination is neither U.S. nor subtropical. Because let’s face it–we have now lived in Florida for 2 1/2 years, which in Familia time is about two decades. By the time we leave, we will have lived in Florida for over three times as long as we’ve ever lived anywhere else. Oh, the ironies of life. The weird thing is, I think my internal clock is set according to moves rather than time in any specific location.… Read more

We’re Famous . . . Again!

Sarah Bringhurst Familia

When I was dating Tony, one of the interesting things that he told me about himself was that he had lived with his family in Indonesia as a teenager. While living there, they spent a summer visiting family in a little town in Idaho, where their exotic expatriate exploit made them instant celebrities. An article even appeared in the local newspaper about the American family who were living in Southeast Asia, and had now brought their international selves home to grace tiny Aberdeen Idaho.

It became an even better story after the same thing happened to us. In 2008, we moved our little family to Chiusa di Pesio, Italy so that we could reconnect with our Italian roots and claim our long-lost Italian citizenship.… Read more