Follow our relocation from CZ to UK - how do we do it with tiny expats?
As some of you might already know, we're a family of serial expats - I (Ukrainian) met my husband (Russian) in UK. We moved to Germany, where our older tiny expat was born. Three of us moved first to China and then to Russia, where we welcomed the second tiny expat. Shortly after, we moved to Czech Republic, where we've been living for more than a year now. As it happend quite a lot in our life, during the last 15 years, we are relocating again, this time to UK.
Are you an expat yourself or just planning to become one? I decided to invite you to follow our journey, to share with you what we learnt so far and what might be useful for some of you as well. Taking into account that I'm writing for the feature called "Expat Kids", I will concentrate on the issues relevant to relocating with children. What should you think about, when planning such a move? How can you help your little ones relocate and settle in? Our children are almost 6 and 2.5 years old at the moment, so those of you with younger kids might find my posts more helpful, I suppose.
Here's an overview of the things I'll be talking about during the next couple of weeks:
- how can you prepare your kids for a relocation?
- what should you take with you in your luggage as opposed to sending with the shipment?
- what things do you need to arrange and/or research in your new home country before and just after the relocation?
- how can your kids participate in the relocation, to feel like they're doing their share of preparations?
- what can you do with your kids during your last few weeks/days in your old home?
- what can you do with them during the first few days, after you just arrived to the new one?
If you have any other questions about planning a relocation with kids, please, do let me know in the comments and I will try to address them here as well!
Should you plan a relocation to UK as well, check out Easy Expat's guide to UK.
Yuliya, author of Expat Kids blog on Easy Expat, is also the author of TinyExpats.com, writing about expat life and travels of their nomadic family, sharing their journey with two tiny expats.
Author: TinyExpatsI’m a mother of two little girls, who are slowly but surely becoming tiny expats. We moved around a lot in the last 10 years or so. I met my husband in London, where we studied together. I moved to UK, when I was 17, from Ukraine and he came there to study, when he was just 12, from Moscow. After I lived in UK for 7 years we moved to Hambrug, where our oldest daughter was born and where we lived for about 4 years. When she was 1 year and 5 months old, we relocated to Shanghai and spent a year there. Our next destination was Moscow, a city where we spent two years and had another baby girl. The next time we moved, our second daughter was about 1 year and 3 months. This was in May 2014, when we arrived to a tiny but a very beautiful and cosy town of Pardubice, Czech Republic.