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Hey!

Happy New Year!

First things first.

We want to thank you for your patience.

An update from us…

We started Roammies in 2023 while living in Portugal. Our daughter was about a year old, and if we’re being honest, we were struggling A LOT.

We’d been living abroad and traveling for nearly 10 years prior to having our daughter. Europe was supposed to be the dream; a lifestyle that would allow us to travel while maintaining an affordable home-base in a country that understood slow living.

Instead, we were deep in sleep deprivation and utter exhaustion in a place that was just a little bit too slow. Meanwhile, we had lost a lot of our clients (and therefore, income) and things just didn’t turned out as we had planned.

Ultimately, whether we were in Europe or Kathmandu (we have actually been there and it was amazing!), it didn’t matter. Our Facebook posts may have showed us walking along the Douro, wine in hand, pushing the stroller and in a new city every month, but our reality behind the scenes was much different.

But, once we got our daughter into daycare (and, one we truly loved…did we mention it was basically free?!) things stabilized a bit. And that’s when we realized something important:

If we wanted to do any version of a digital-nomad-ish lifestyle with young kids, we needed short-term or flexible daycare options abroad.

And, that’s probably how you found us.

We spent hours scouring websites, calling and emailing schools, and talking to other traveling parents to find daycares that met this criteria. We spoke to other families who did some version of this, like a couple who split their year between Spain and Bulgaria, enrolling their child in daycare in both places.

We even tried a daycare in Barcelona for a week. And, we contacted countless schools — from forest schools and short-term schools — as we debated to trying out other cities in Portugal.

Eventually, we pulled in a friend who’s a software engineer to help us build a database of everything we found, that we wanted to share with you.

Then…life kept happening.

We got sidetracked by the stress of deciding where to move next, trying to give our daughter the life we imagined, and just keeping our heads above water.

We did get to experience our daughter chasing pigeons in Plaza Mayor, eating our faces of in in France, and Christmas markets and bookstores in Berlin.

But, we eventually moved to Bogotá, Colombia when Portugal didn’t work anymore.

Shortly after, we found out we were pregnant again — which pushed the project back even more.

And yet, people kept finding Roammies. (Perks of being an SEO strategist. we suppose)

Anyhoo, this email has been LONG overdue. While the database itself took a backseat, we didn’t want to keep sitting on information you signed up for.

So instead of waiting until everything was “perfect,” we decided to share what we do have: the spreadsheet and the database we coded. 👇

Therefore, if you have a place you’d like to add, we ask you to fill out this form here, so we can review it before adding it. Likewise, if you catch anything on the list above that you don’t think should be there for whatever reason, please let us know. 👇

Here’s the plot twist:

The short-term daycare lifestyle didn’t actually work for our family.

A little disappointing, considering this is what birthed the idea of Roammies.

Our daughter needed routine and consistency (which can exist while traveling), but more than anything…we needed a break.

We needed time to regroup. We wanted to have another baby. And we wanted to make those early months as gentle as possible for all of us.

So, we chose to live abroad, stay in one place, and travel when we can, instead of jumping from place to place like we originally had intended.

We still think worldschooling or slower travel may be in our future (unfortunately, there aren’t too many worldschooling hubs for little ones). But right now, we’ve found a really good rhythm in Colombia. And we’re still traveling when the opportunity comes up (Buenos Aires in April, y’all! — please send us your recs!).

Traveling with little ones (we now have a 3.5-year-old and a 4-month-old) is still full of challenges and triumphs that are hard to explain unless you’re living it. Choosing schools or even deciding on your ideology about schooling altogether is not a decision that’s made overnight.

Add remote work and a modest income to the mix, and it gets even more complex.

What we’ve realized is that this life doesn’t look the same for every family.

Some of you are absolutely crushing it moving from place to place with little ones. (We’ve met amazing van-life families and parents traveling during extended parental leave — shoutout to Europe’s paternity policies.) Others, like us, stay put for stretches and travel when they can.

But even when our setups look different, we’re on the same journey.

And, we may have a lot of the same questions:

Like when we thought spending 11 days at the beach in Santa Marta with small kids was a great idea.

(It was not.)

We want Roammies to be a space where we can come together digitally, even if we don’t cross paths physically (though we hope some of us do).

We’re not trying to build a meet-up platform, a homeswap site, or the next hub. (At least, not right now…who knows what the future holds?)

We want a place to:

A space without judgment, where we can support each other, share golden travel-with-toddler/baby nuggets, and swap advice only parents of little ones truly understand.

Like:

As young kids start to develop their little personalities — while we’re still figuring out how to parent abroad — there’s just so much to navigate.

Even when you feel a little lost, we hope Roammies can be your North Star.

This year, our goal is simple and realistic: grow this newsletter and see where it leads.

We hope it’s something you can look forward to reading (of course, whenever the kids are finally asleep).

Stay tuned,

Max, Hana, Mika, & Sam

If you’re a traveling family — or a family living abroad with little ones — and want to be featured, we’d love to hear from you.

We’re interested in talking about:

We’re also interested if you have a blog or YouTube channel that talks about your travels with young kids, or any projects you’re working on that are related.

We’re also particularly curious if anyone has done Japanese Preschool Exchange, as we've been reading a lot about it and it sounds like the type of thing we would be interested in trying out.

We want the good, the bad, and the ugly.

Like a blowout and you forgot a change of clothes in the diaper bag, ugly.

Or, the time we thought we could use a nanny service for a wedding we were attending in Cartagena and it was an absolute disaster.

Or, better news, like when we did a home exchange in Germany and stayed for 10 days at another family’s home who already had all the baby gear.

If you want to share some gems or stories with the community, please get in touch!