🇨🇻 In a break from the usual long-form written posts, these are voice-memo postcards from a month-long island hopping trip to Cabo Verde, travelling with three young kiddos✌🏻. You can catch Part 1 here 🇨🇻
Hello Restless Ones,
🎶 Sung to the tune of Europe’s classic Anthem ‘The Final Countdown’ - It’s the final postcaaarrd!
And I can’t quite believe it.
I’m 10% missing home and 90% ready to get on the next train, bus, plane and just… keep on going. Is this the sign of a great trip, or a sign that my feet are itchier than ever? Who knows.
For now, grab yourself a big glass of hibiscus juice, a steaming bowl of Cachupa and hit the play button to listen to me chit-chat, or have a read of the transcript below.
✌🏻 Paid peeps: If you’ve got any questions about the trip or Cabo Verde as a country - drop them in the comments and I’ll answer them as best I can ❤️
📸 Photos from the week are at the bottom of the post as usual.
All that’s left is to say is a mooassive thank you for coming with me on this, the first of many full-fam adventures. I have LOVED having you along for the ride.
Catch you next week with a return to the usual restless essays.
With much love and a side helping of sunshine sauce,
Anna xxx
Transcript of Voice Memo
For the reading peeps… It ain’t all perfect but its all here :)
Hello, Restless People, happy Thursday to you!
Last week, the update was that we got to the island of Sal having spent time on São Vicente and then on a place with Santiago. So we’d got to the island of Sal and just been slapped around the chops with different vibe, because this island is a lot more traditionally touristy.
But within a couple of days, we embraced the new vibe and we settled.
Meeting Emily
The reason we came to this island at the end of the trip, is for the kids, really, because one of the biggest things is that we just wanted them to have some other kids to hang out with, because we got our cultural fix on the last few islands, but there haven’t really been that many kids to play with, or if they have, they’ve only been where we were for a day or two.
So I asked Storm yesterday. I said, “So stormy...” And at this point I’m sitting opposite her. She’s drinking a fruit juice, palm trees swaying overhead, and she’s got her hair in braids. (You know those braids you get done when you’re on a trip somewhere abroad. She’s got beads in her hair, like a proper little hippie girl. And said to her ”So, we’re going home in a few days. What’s been your favorite part of the month, exploring Cabo Verde?” And she took a long sip of fruit juice, and she said: “Meeting Emily.”
Making Friends
Emily is a two-year-old girl who we’ve met in the past week, and she’s Dutch girl. It’s a bit like dogs meeting in a park, I feel, when you meet parents with kids of similar age, and Emily is a single child, so our three kids just descend on her every day.
They spot her. They love her. When they first met her, she was playing with baby doll, which Jupiter absolutely loved. They wanted to just undress and redress this baby doll. And just gradually, because you’re in the same place for the week, you have a bit of a longer chat with the parents. And then you get to bond a bit more, and you share a few laughs.
The Babysitting Offer
And then by the time we’ve got to the end of this week, Emily’s mum did the sweetest thing. She came by where we were, and she said: “I’ve been meaning to say I’m in awe of what you and Jamie are doing with your three kids. It must be exhausting, and you always seem to have so much energy” (Which I do not. But we’ll get to that in a minute...) But she said: “If you and Jamie want to go out to dinner one night, or you want to go out for a drink or something, I’ll come to your room and I’ll watch your kids. So you can go out and have a drink.”
She’s trains nursery nurses for a job, so she trains people who work in childcare, basically, so and she’s so lovely and friendly. And I was just blown away by her kindness.
That is possibly the greatest gift you could offer two tired parents. We I then had to be really awkward and say ”I just wouldn’t feel comfortable” But she’s Dutch, so they just say it how it is, and she says “Oh totally, I’m a stranger! It’s no problem.”
And I said: “I just wouldn’t be able to relax in case the kids wake up.” But I thought that was the loveliest thing that she could have offered us.
Progress party in the Pool!
So we’ve spent the whole week playing with little Emily from the Netherlands and there’s loads of other kids here, and I love watching our kids start playing with them, even though there’s no shared language between them, they just get in there and they just start playing. So that’s been amazing.
The other thing that’s been amazing, and I was trying to tot up how many times we’ve been swimming in the past month, we’ve probably averaged one and a half times a day. Not you can half get in the swimming pool, although the kids did try that at one hotel, then they went in fully clothed.
But I’d say some days we’ve done two, twice a day. Other days we’ve done once a day. But watching the change in the kids is brilliant.
We do like weekly swimming lessons back home, and Stormy is not a fan of the water.
Storm’s Swimming Story
I will never forget when she got a level two duckling thing Award, a little certificate at our local swimming pool at home and I said” “Oh, Storm, look at this. You’ve got this duckling thing. Isn’t that great?” And I explained that it said that she could now put her face in the water. And she looked at me, confused. And said “But mum, but I don’t like putting my face in the water?” She was thinking ‘why would I want the certificate telling me I can do something I don’t like doing?!’ And she had a point.
But anyway, watching Storm’s progress out here has been lovely - she is now trying to swim without armbands. She is fully dunking her head. She’s letting Jamie do what we call bombs, which is lobbing her across the pool. And watching her confidence grow has been amazing.
Twinning + Swimming = Winning
And the second thing has been fab is we started this trip with the twinsnot being able to float on their own. And we brought out some floating vest things, and they just didn’t really work. They just bobbed around like a weird buoy out at sea and flopped on their front, flopped on their back, and it was just a disaster.
So we gave up on those vests. But they started seeing Storm with the armbands. They got a bit of armband envy, and so I put Jupiter in the armbands one day, and she wobbled about a bit, and then she started floating, and she loved it. And now both the twins are in armbands, and they’re just off! Which is much easier for us rather than holding them all the time.
Fit Mumma? (Nah, tired Mumma)
The other thing I wanted to reflect on is that I thought I was going to have way more energy to do exercise on this trip, but (and I’m going to be easy on myself) the reality is we are parenting in the morning from 5.30am until 7pm at night, and the only break that we have is in the middle of the day, which is around about 1 hour 10 minutes when the twins go to sleep and we put a little show on Netflix for Storm.
At points, I’ve used this break to go to the gym. Obviously, me and Jamie have to take it in turns, but increasingly towards the end of this journey, I’m just so knackered, and I have to use that time to lie in a dark room and just be quiet and not stimulated, and even have one of those naps that’s not quite a nap but is resting.
So I thought I’d share that with you, because that’s cracking me up. My little naps.
I said to Jamie “I’m not doing any training sessions” But then I realised that every day, all day long, is a training session, because we’re normally carrying kids around somewhere, heffing them up and down.
The time to reflect
So next week’s post will be a written essay as usual again, and I just wanted to say a massive, massive thank you for all of you for listening, for reading, for sticking with me on this month where I thought, ‘How am I possibly going to keep up myself newsletter while I’m away?
And I wanted to let you in honestly to what it is like being away as a family of five when your littles are very little.
I’ve really enjoyed doing these updates, and I know that in years to come, I’ll look back on them and listen in and just think back really fondly.
We have two days now left until we fly back to the UK. I think we’ve got a four-hour flight and then a little layover in Lisbon, and then we’ve got another three-hour flight, and then we’ve got Granddad, Don Jamie’s dad, picking us up in our car, which is now fixed.
So he’s driving our car to London to pick us up, and then we’ll get back at about 2am to Gloucester. So we’ve got all of that to come an it’ll be chaos no doubt.
Coming next week…
In next week’s post I’m going to take the chance to do some reflecting, because that is the greatest gift that I’ve had, apart from the fact that I’ve spent so much time with my kids.
As I said to Jamie today… it really is like grains of sand, slipping through your fingers. There are so many moments out here where I just catch myself and time is moving in slow motion, and I look at my kid in my arms, or I watch them play in the sand, or laughing their face off in the pool, or asking you some question about some new food or new language...
And I want to slow that time down even more, because I want to hold on to that moment, but I just can’t. I’ve just got to let it go, but it’s so precious.
And so with that in mind, I’ve had a few revelations, about life and about what we want to be doing with the next 5 to 10, years, and I’m so grateful for that chance to step out of the… are we gonna call it the ‘daily grind’?
Heck yeah, I’m calling it the daily grind!
I’m so grateful for the chance to step out of the daily grind, to actually feel more like myself again, more myself than I have in the past two and a half years.
Thank You and Sending Sunshine
I want to say thank you again for tuning in. Lots of love sending sunshine from Cabo Verde, especially if you’re in Britain, because I have heard it is (to use a British term) minging there at the moment. So I am sending you some virtual sunshine through the airwaves right now. Okay, take care. Bye, bye.
📸 The Family Photo Album
This week’s snaps contain some faves we may all recognise from when we were kids. Buried in the sand, anyone? Braids in your hair?
