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I lived all my childhood in a small Italian village, I never moved home, I had my routine, my family, my friends.

My three children have been on the move since they were born, we have never lived in the same place for more than two years, they don’t have a place they call home, WE are home for them.

Travelling is the best learning tool and here are a few anecdotes which demonstrate it.

  • When we were living in the UK my Little Miss Fussy went to childcare at the age of 11 months. She had the most caring “teacher” I could have ever dreamt; this teacher had black skin and since then my girl has developed a love for people with dark skin (I guess they remind her of all the cuddles received from her teacher). As a child I have never met someone with a different colour skin from mine and I’m so pleased my girl doesn’t see any difference between our skin colour and other people’s colours.
  • At the age of 4 my little Miss Fussy started school in the Netherlands, it was an international school with children coming from many places. She became a friend with a girl from Pakistan and one day, when we were eating our pizza at home she wrapped up a slice in an odd way and said “I made a chapati“. I was so surprised to know that she had seen her friend eating chapati at school everyday and she wanted to be like her. She had learnt something about other cultures’ food by simple observation.
  • When Little Miss Fussy started kindergarten in Berlin, she was only 5 and she was so scared of her male teacher, so tall and speaking a weird language (she had never heard German before). After a few months he became her favourite teacher, the one who said “there is no bad weather only bad clothes”, the one who taught her many facts about trees and animals during their walking in the woods in the snow. She taught her the love for Nature and since then she hasn’t stopped hugging and climbing trees, enjoying bush walks and the nature in general.
  • When still living in Berlin one day my Little Miss Fussy asked me for a couple of skewers while eating her grapes. I gave her a questioning look and when she showed me how to eat grapes with the two sticks I gave her, I was speechless. She said she had learnt how to eat with two sticks from an Asian boy at the canteen at kindergarten. Amazing! She said this boy always used sticks instead of fork and knife and she wanted to try. why not?!
  • We arrived in Australia in August, it was nearly the end of winter time. Both the girls observed the trees had still leaves on their branches. We did a short research and found out that Australian trees don’t lose their leaves in Autumn, they change their barks (how interesting!).

There are so many other things they have learnt along the way about geography, flags, time zones, languages, history…

Thank you tinyexpat for letting me think about this topic. This post is part of the TinyTravellers project.