Out + About: Lazy Summer Beach Day in Hornbaek

July 24, 2015

Although they have school year-round here in forest school, which is a great help when trying to plan a summer for toddlers, it doesn’t mean we don’t get in those lazy summer days. You know, the kind where everyone sleeps in just a little…when you can buy yourself an extra snooze as a parent with a few cartoons…when the heat sets in and and you make a batch of smoothies in the blender and ultimately you decide to go spend the rest of the day at the beach?

We recently had a few of those days a couple of weeks ago. The summer weather here in Denmark is…shall we say, variable…so when the sun comes out and the temperature rises, people really do drop everything to take advantage of it. We’re lucky because there are a few great beach towns in the area and one of our favorites, hot weather or not, is Hornbaek.

Quaint, flat, and on the seaside, the picturesque cottages house little restaurants as well as a few cute shops (Danish designer Ilse Jacobsen practically owns this town). We always grab some lunch first, and have the inevitable stop by the mini-golf course for a few rides on the electric cars.

The water is chilly, not that matters much to the kids, but the sand and beach are very clean. When you have forest schoolers in tow, they naturally want to collect just about everything on the beach: shells…sand…crabs, dead or alive. Lucky for us, it buys us a bit of time to enjoy the beach while our toddler stays busy. Hornbaek beach also has one of the coolest playgrounds as well, right on the beach with natural wood structures. I didn’t get pictures of it this time around, but check out this post on Hornbaek for more.

Ice cream is also de rigueur and a stop at the Hansen’s if you want to go Danish, or at Ben & Jerry’s if you’re feeling homesick, does the trick - we always enjoy ours while watching the boats on the little harbor. The best is around the five o’clock hour when most Danes head in early to get ready for dinner - we can enjoy the beach nearly entirely to ourselves for just a little while longer…

Headed to Hornbaek? Be sure to check out:

Denmark Derby: Hornbaek

Ilse Jacobsen’s Flowers on Hornbaek

and if you’re headed to Hornbaek without the little ones, Pool Day on Hornbaek

Princess Isabella and the Nature School…

July 22, 2015

Even the royals get in with nature here in Denmark. While Princess Isabella doesn’t attend a forest school, Danish royals aren’t afraid to get a little mucky in their free time either.

View image | gettyimages.com

Now that Princess Isabella is 8, apparently she’s starting to take on “official duties” - the first one being the christening of a ship named after her on Samso Island. I was in the middle of researching a weekend to Samso when I came across these photos. Not only is a major ship her namesake (Cool? We thought so - my daughter asked me where we can get one of those. Um, nowhere.), but she also took the day to visit a nature school, a shrimp and bird estuary, and the strawberry fields of the island.

View image | gettyimages.com

Princess Isabella isn’t afraid to throw on a little nature gear like rubber waders and falconry gloves - after all, she’s still a child. And one in Denmark at that. Here, being a royal isn’t all just tea parties and tiaras. Just the way it should be, right?

All photos via Getty Images, except last two images via World Royal Family.

Video: A Toddler in…Fuglebjerggaard Farm!

July 20, 2015

Just a little something to change things up! I’ll have photos from our farm outing soon but in the meantime, a little video of some summer strawberry picking over at Camilla Plum’s Fuglebjerggaard Farm!

Video and music via Replay.

But I’m Danish + One Year To Go + Expat Survival Tips from Clara Wiggins

July 16, 2015

The other day, my daughter was explaining to someone that she was Danish. Obviously, that’s not the case on paper, but it’s becoming clearer to me that she is increasingly feeling Danish, whereas feeling American is rather abstract for her. This is not to say that she doesn’t know America. We’re gearing up for a trip back to North Dakota (my home state!) next week, and she’ll be in the DC/New Jersey area next month (our other US home). While I was working, trips back to see the US and both sets of grandparents were very much the norm as I often had to return to the home office and let her tag along. But to her, these trips back are starting to seem more like destinations at the end of an airplane route, and less like home.

We just completed two years here in Denmark, which is a good time for me to cue up the cliché of not being able to believe how fast it went by. And it’s just now at the two-year mark, that I feel like we are hitting our stride as expats around here, although for my daughter that feeling of comfort probably hit sooner. She was just two and a half when we came here, so anything that is truly in her working memory is from here in Denmark. She’s making big preparations in her mind for when she leaves the forest school to start real school, “skole”. She’s got all sorts of plans; I don’t yet have the heart to tell her that while she will in fact start school, it won’t be here.

We have one year left to go, so I’m facing the dual preparations of soaking up every ounce of what we love about this place, while trying to pre-plan for a smooth transition, most likely back to the US for us for one year. When we came here, I didn’t think too much about preparing our kids since we only had one and she was so young. This time, I’m planning on being a bit better prepared.

To that end I have been reading the new book by fellow diplo-spouse Clara Wiggins on “The Expat Partner’s Survival Guide”, specifically the chapter on moving with children. It’s a great resource for thinking through transitions for everyone involved in the move, and quite honestly, I wished I had picked it up sooner. It’s full of tips and experiences, but also has a comprehensive resource list at the end of each chapter to help you in your own specific move.

A couple of things that she advises for raising kids in this type of lifestyle:

Take kids “home” when possible for holidays
Keep kids current with some shows or books or jokes
Celebrate key holidays from home (hello, stars and stripes!)
Talk about home and returning there

With one year out, I realize we’ve been doing a lot of the first three, but not so much for the fourth. We’ve always done a lot of looking at photographs and videos here at our house, so it should be easy enough to layer in more conversations about home and what that means, where we are from and why that matters. I can still create enough space for her to feel her own brand of Danish without taking away the fact that she is American.

It makes me all a bit nostalgic for how quickly the time has gone (there’s that cliché again) but may this last year be the best year - at forest school and beyond!

If you’re also an expat or third culture, check out The Expat Partner’s Survival Guide a helpful guide, and also blog. And just to prove that Clara Wiggins is an expat pro herself, check out her thoughts on living in the tropical life on the isle of St Lucia over on the other blog.

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