Making our home in Toulouse

Our first months in Toulouse were all about getting adjusted and settled in. Really, we’ll be adjusting for a while as we learn more and more about family life in France, but we had a great start in fall 2024.

Mara started school in September and even though she’s been in daycare in 3 different countries since the age of 5 months, this was very different. École maternelle feels much more like school than her preschool in Sweden or New Zealand, because it is actually school, not daycare. The kids have a schedule, walk in by themselves, hang their stuff on their hook without help from the parents, pickup and drop off are very set times, lunch is in the canteen, there are no snacks, absences need reasons… so yeah, it’s school. She has been doing fantastic through all of it, so much so that she regularly recreates her day with her toys at home.

We are so fortunate to have a lovely walk to school, and for Mara, many transportation options. Her favorite is a toss up between the bike and her scouter.

As I write this we’re in the second half of the year and she’s made so much progress. First she’s understanding more French. Even if she’s not speaking much yet, her teachers tell us she’s understanding more and more. Teary dropoffs ended after just a few weeks and now she walks in easily by herself. For the first 4 months she ate absolutely nothing at school, nothing at all of the school provided hot lunch and since there’s no snacking, she just didn’t eat anything between 8:30am and 4:30pm. Nothing! Somehow she wasn’t a monster at the end of the day so we just figured that eventually she would start eating something. And sure enough, she started eating bread and dessert (if it’s fruit or yogurt) the first week back in January! She is, of course, a big fan of the after school snack, the French goûter, which is usually something sweet. And thankfully for us, she’s also into afternoon apero.

At home, we were in project mode from the day we landed in Toulouse. We needed appliances, kitchen cabinets, and counters tout de suite, so we put our first of many IKEA and Darty orders in quickly and got to work. Using no power tools at all, just hand tools, we managed to install a kitchen cabinet with 4 huge drawers and a counter top, making our kitchen actually functional! We had one failed attempt at upper shelving before landing on our green kitchen nook with stylish and functional String shelving.

Decor, storage, and lighting were seriously lacking around the rest of the apartment, but in time we’ve made big progress and are loving our space.

The thing that brought us to Toulouse was Wylie’s new job as a CNRS researcher at the Laboratory of Theoretical Physics at the University of Toulouse. So, of course, in the first few months Wylie was also adjusting to his new workplace. He has a lovely bike commute along the Canal Saint Martin and has a pretty great office with a nice view of the hills.

And on my end, I’ve been so fortunate to still be at my job at Peoplism. I rejoined the co-working space but also really enjoy working from our apartment. With the view of the Garonne river and bright airiness in the apartment, it’s just a really pleasant place to be. An amazing thing about our view is that as the weather changes and the leaves fall, our view of the river only gets better.