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Join me out here on a limb for a sec.
I'm guessing that since you're here at Juggle, the three work-versus-family challenges my wife and I set out to tame this year may be painfully familiar: - Not enough adventuring: Our own home-based businesses weren't permitting us to do anywhere near as much joint family "adventuring" with our three young daughters as we'd figured they would.
- Not enough learning: Our younger daughters' public school experiences were pretty good, all things considered, but we wanted something better. Even with the vaunted flexibility of our home-based businesses, we weren't able to make any real difference in what their experiences in school were like.
- Not enough goofing off: Our family vacations were turning into working vacations for me (curse that email...), costing precious goofing-off time with the girls on a porch swing or a wooden dock.
It was Peggy who came up with the Really Great Idea: why not shift at least some of the focus of our home-based businesses to allow us to combine that work with the "work" of our family? In other words, make the business of raising the girls more of a part of the family business?
And so we did. This is the story of one aspect of the resulting plan: how we were able to take an affordable trip to France that helped us begin to solve all three challenges.
Better Kitchen-Table Learning
Last winter, we began developing the outline for a book on family learning--essentially, how to give learning and discovery and just finding stuff out a good name among the 12-and-under set in a family household. We have worked in or near the fields of publishing and education for much of our lives--enough, anyway, to fool ourselves into thinking that we could create a kind of family learning "curriculum" other parents might value.
We envisioned devoting a good chunk of the book to a journal relating our own experiences as we tried to incorporate more informal "discovery learning" into our regular family routines. We weren't going to be ridiculous about it. We would just try to make it part of the family plan to stock the kitchen counter with books relevant to a chosen (mostly historical) theme, rent the occasional relevant movie, look up the occasional relevant topic in the dictionary or world atlas, and emerge from each historical period with at least a vague, anecdotal notion of what life then was all about.
But we needed something more, something to capture the imagination of Caroline (12), Bonnie (9), and Eliza Rose (7). Something to help them sense that this was all going to be nine parts fun and one part...well, more fun. Otherwise it wasn't going to work.
How could we make learning a real adventure for them? We thought, "Let's get outa town. Let's go far, far away from our little North Shore community, and stick ourselves in some historical foreign place where we will learn simply by being there, taking notes for our family curriculum book all the while." And so that gave us a new challenge to think about: Where do we go to create a fun, meaningful learning adventure, and how do we do it affordably?
Adventures Built on Trust
We found the perfect answer in international home exchange--a small but growing segment of the travel industry. In some ways, I regret being an agent in the continuing growth of home-swapping; today, it's still a small enough slice of the pie that it remains completely unregulated and can police itself solely on the strength of virtues like old-fashioned honesty and trust. Someday, perhaps, the hotel industry will sit up and take notice of the money not being sent its way, and home-swappers will suddenly have to jump hoops for some international licensing authority.
But right now, you can swap your house or apartment with other homeowners from Scotland to Singapore--people you've never met in your life--on the basis of nothing more than your assumed mutual integrity.
Now there's a lesson, all by itself!
How to Swap Homes
Here's how it works. First, you list your own house in one of the big international home-swapping agency directories. We chose to use Homelink International (www.swapnow.com) because the photos in its directory are in color. (Intervac International is another agency; www.intervac.com.) The listing will cost close to $100 (less than the cost of one night in a decent vacation hotel) and you'll be able to indicate where in the world you'd consider going, the time frame during which you'd like to travel, and a wide range of information about your own home (and car, if you want to swap it, too).
The directories are printed several times per year, but most home-swappers time their listing so that it appears in the largest edition, which appears in late December or early January when they are beginning to make plans for the following summer. The directory in which our house was listed included announcements for more than 5,000 houses and apartments, blazed across 540 pages with full-color photos of most of the entries. It showed up on a snowy day in January, and that was when the fun really began.
Bow to Your Partner
I can only describe the process by which home-swappers identify, contact, gently negotiate with, and ultimately choose their swapping partners as an elaborate dance--an old-time square dance, in fact, where you find yourself whirling every moment from one partner to another, pausing every now and then to promenade with one or two special ones before ending up (surprise!) facing the partner you'd do-si-do'd with near the very beginning.
Over the course of the four or five weeks following the delivery of our directory, we received more than 70 inquiries from prospective swappers who'd picked us out of their copy, and sent out at least 50 inquiries of our own, by email, fax, or phone. At one moment during that time, we were actively considering a half-dozen homes in five different countries: Ireland, Scotland, England, France, and Italy. We felt like world travelers already.
In the end, we elected to exchange with a family of experienced swappers who owned a beautiful (to judge from its photo) thatched-roof cottage on the edge of a forest near Rouen in Normandy. The family spoke no English, so we needed to rely on our high-school French to settle on dates, car swapping, airport pickups, and simply making friends over the phone. We felt reasonably confident that we'd understood most of what Corinne and Jean-Michel had said to us, and that they'd understood nearly everything we'd tried to communicate to them. (As I said, the whole thing really does run on honesty and trust.)
The Business of Our Lives
For us, home-swapping provided the perfect answer to our international family vacation challenge--and the perfect way to blend work with the workings of our family. We let all of our clients know we'd be out of touch for two weeks in July (and killed ourselves making assorted deadlines the week before the trip). For two weeks, we made the principal business of our lives--raising our children--the principal business of our daily life. We took the girls to wonderful museums (but not too many). We taste-tested Norman cheese (okay, and Norman eclairs too). We stood on Monet's Japanese bridge, picked our way around the ruined castle of Richard the Lion-Heart, and sketched the slanted roofs and ancient alleyways of Mont St. Michel.
Our journals, photos, and sketches will become fodder for the family learning book; the fat envelope of receipts will nourish the deductions on my tax return. Most important, the memories from the trip will warm all five of us this winter, when the complexities of normal daily life will make those days in Normandy seem like a visit to a foreign planet. And they will remind us--not that we'll need the reminder--to jump on those faxes when they come rolling in from prospective swappers in Yorkshire, or Germany's Black Forest, or the Italian Lake District. Or Tuscany. Or Granada.... ANDY CALKINS wrote this article while on a portable-home-office/working vacation with his family, but didn't feel guilty about it at all.
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Reactions to "Winning Your Bread--and Eating It, Too"
I work as a negotiator, taking a Customer Advocate role, during technically 'difficult' situations internationally in the world's stock exchanges and banking systems. They use computer systems that run 7-by-24 (all the time), and thus I normally work 'all the time.' I am wired.
My wife and I took a two-month sabbatical in Tuscany to learn their cooking. We were involved in the host family's home life, shopping, planning, and social events. From these wonderful models, we learned not just about olive oil, pasta, and gnocci, but how important it is to take the time to appreciate and enjoy the life. I managed survive without my pager, computer, cellular, and totally forgot about work. I did not miss email.
Joe Bailey
Negotiator
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