Long time, no see

I haven’t written a blog post for ages, not because I havent wanted to, or even because I havent had ideas, but simply because I just cannot seem to find the time. But, as life has changed quite a lot over the past few months, I’m going to give a quick update.

But where to start?

In September last year, heavily pregnant with Number 3, I decided that living on the west coast of Canada, far from family and with no real support network was just not going to cut it with three children under five. So I flew home to my parents’ house, with the children and many, many suitcases, and my husband followed a couple of weeks later with no children but also a lot of suitcases.

We spent the next six, stressful months living with my parents. Stressful because: my dad was poorly, we had a newborn, my four-year old started school, my husband was working Canadian hours, we were all living in a four-bed house not really designed for seven people, lockdown, homeschooling…

We’d never meant to stay that long, but COVID prevented us from travelling on to France or Switzerland as we had planned.

Anyway, it became clear enough was enough and as we couldn’t find anywhere to rent with a lease of less than a year, we ended up in an Air BnB for two months. It was fairly expensive, obviously, but it meant my daughter could continue going to the same school, we could still see my parents regularly and everyone had a bit more breathing space. My husband found a new job, based in Switzerland, and started working from home for them, which meant his hours were more normal and also meant we knew where we eventually needed to end up. Then his company decided that they would be going back into the office at the beginning of August, so we had a deadline.

Having not seen my husband’s family for over two years, we decided to go to Switzerland via his parents’ house in Provence. We stayed there for a month, before going to stay with his sister closer to Switzerland for a week and finally spending the weekend with a friend in Basel before arriving here, in Martigny, where we’ll be living.

Unfortunately, we still don’t actually have anywhere to live… as foreigners, renting for the first time in Switzerland is a real pain. In order to rent you need a certain type of permit, but in order to get this permit you need to have an address. Can anyone spot the problem here?

Also, the rental market is pretty intense – the good ones get snapped up immediately – and I’m pretty picky. I’m a stay-at-home mum, so I, well, stay at home a lot. I want my home to be somewhere I actually *want* to live. I have three young children, so I need there to be a washing machine. Ideally I want a house but that’s basically impossible here so I want to be on the ground floor and have a garden, but that’s pretty much impossible too, so I’d settle for a lift and playground…

Anyway, due to the Catch-22 situation we’ve missed out on some really nice ones (including an ACTUAL HOUSE with an ACTUAL GARDEN, but we won’t dwell on that). We’ve sent off applications to a few more that we’re waiting to hear back from and in the meantime we’re in an Air BnB. It’s pretty good, but expensive and also on the top floor of a block of flats with no lift, and no washing machine… but it does have a Nespresso machine so at least I’m caffeinated.

So to bring you up to date: we’re living in very temporary accommodation (as in, next week we’ll be homeless), my daughter starts school on Monday, the vast majority of our stuff is in storage in the UK waiting until we have an address to ship it to, my 2 year-old desperately needs to get settled and back into a routine… and the baby has just learnt to crawl. It’s fine. I’m fine. We’re all fine.