Wander & Nest

Let’s start with the good. I had a long to do list of things to get kicked off in 2025 – join a gym, start private french lessons, find doctors for me and Mara, intentionally carve out time to meet and connect with people, bring back my and Wylie’s Friday afternoons off together, keep doing home projects, etc. And all of that has actually happened! It felt nice to find a routine and most importantly make time for things I really wanted to do but wouldn’t without a good plan.

Mara is living her best toddler life in Toulouse. She loves an indoor picnic, bitter dark chocolate ice cream when it’s freezing outside, carousels, stopping for street performers, and so much more. She’s even learning the upside of sick days at home – snacks on the couch and TV.

We celebrated Wylie’s 40th birthday on January 12th! We didn’t do anything too big, though 40 would have warranted it, we just had a family day in Toulouse. We took a bike ride up the Garonne river to a park. It was a nice sunny day but quite cold and it was our first leisure family bike ride so it was new for all of us, especially Mara. We didn’t end up staying too long and hurried home to get warmed up. Wylie got to enjoy the afternoon on his own then we put his raclette cooker gift to good use with a raclette dinner at home!

We did a bike day round 2 a few weeks later and it went much smoother , the warmer weather helped a lot! We went to a park for a picnic then stumbled on a farm we could visit and feed the animals. It almost felt like we were back in New Zealand.

Thanks to the availability and ease of taking trains we’ve started doing weekend day trips to nearby towns, it’s such a good way to explore the region. Our first was to Foix on a 1€ day – the first weekend of every month, regional train tickets are €1, mind blowing! It was cute and quiet, we had a great lunch and explored the ancient castle. Mara was very excited about the castle, that is until she was tired of walking up and down stairs. Lesson learned to pace ourselves next time.

Then we took another day trip to Carcassone to visit the medieval city, it’s just incredible that this all exists within a couple hours from where we live… all by foot and train!

Corinne, aka Auntie Corinne, visited us again from Paris. We had a lovely low key weekend of eating, drinking, and just hanging out in the best kind of casual way with a good friend. I love this collection of photos I’m accidentally collecting of Mara holding Corrine’s hand through cute French streets.

Ok, now for the ughhhh part of this post. It’s of course dealing with the firehose of horror coming from the US after the new administration took office in late January. I’ll keep it short because there’s no shortage of media and content of all the unhinged, scary stuff that’s happening. Personally, on my end, as a remote DEI consultant working with US-based clients, work is very uncertain. I am so grateful everyday that I still have a job, but I realize it may not be long lasting and a change is likely on the horizon. As much as I want to be constantly engaged and up to date on what’s going on, it is quite exhausting to talk and hear about US politics all the time. And it’s especially challenging when the conversations are in French! It’s a bit of a weird feeling for me… it’s a mix of relief that we are out of the US but also this sense of guilt at the same time. I don’t quite have the words to describe it yet, maybe I’ll end up finding them in French first.