Category — Planning

It was pretty clear that if we were going to take this sabbatical, we had to set a date on the calendar and then just go. Picking the date was easy.  The school our kids attend has two campuses – one for nursery through kindergarten.  Another for grade 1 and higher.

The girls are one grade apart (one of the real benefits of the otherwise ABSURD decision to have them so close together) so the year that we would have a two-campus drop-off seemed like the perfect year to be gone.  So the date was set:  September 2010.

But it was still just a dream.  We had no idea how anything worked. We had heard so much about the agony of dealing with infamous French bureaucracy and we just had no idea where to start.

One of my first clients when I started consulting was married to a professor, and she had been on sabbatical with him several times.  I bought her a coffee and picked her brain and got a ton of ideas from her.  Her first sabbatical was when her daughter was in Grade 1 and she did a 8-month stint in Paris.  She had her kids full time and was launching a company in the US while she was gone. But she was so enthusiastic about how great that trip was it for their family, that the excitement rubbed off.

She shared her wisdom about a lot of things – schools, friends, work, healthcare, etc.  And just made it seem so possible.   That was the point that the trip became real to me.  As we’ve figured out stuff for ourselves, we’re actually not going to end up doing a lot of the things she suggested, but just knowing that she made it work gave me faith.  Thanks Denise!!!