Remember When We Took Two Laminated Paddingtons to Italy and Came Home With One.
No school to answer to in Glasgow. Enrolled in a hybrid academy for Italy. What school actually looked like both ways, and what it cost.
The kitchen in our Glasgow flat had no windows. I was in there with my AeroPress, an electric kettle, and no scale to weigh the beans, making a mess of what was supposed to be a cup of coffee.
When I finally dialed in a cup, I carried it into the room with the dining table, and the light hit me first. The windows were huge, and the morning sun was pouring through them.
Heather and the girls were already at the table. Curriculum and the morning's worksheets were spread across it. Heather had a book open and was reading to them. Smiling, but firm.
Those windows sat maybe three feet from the sidewalk in Mount Florida, the neighborhood we'd rented into. People walked past mid-conversation, close enough that we could hear them through the glass, and every car sounded like it was driving through the room. We learned fast to angle the blinds: enough to keep the girls' eyes on the page, not so much that we lost the sun.
School had begun.
A few minutes later, Heather pulled me in. The girls' online curriculum, Reading Eggs, was mine. It was mine at home, too. Heather did most of the teaching, but I was the one who led the girls through their online reading, math, and grammar. Same job. Different table. And because of the time difference, I didn't have to rush off to work.
That was 2022, our first trip. No co-op, no school, nobody's calendar but ours. We could have skipped a morning and nobody would have known. The curriculum was on the table anyway.
In September 2024, the girls started a two-day-a-week hybrid academy back home in Tennessee. The following April, we planned 39 days in Italy right inside the school year.
That spring, Lucy's second-grade class was reading The Adventures of Paddington, and the class had a Paddington project coming up while we'd be gone. So Heather brought it with us.
Before we left, the girls colored him at our school table at home. Each picked her own Paddington design. They took their time: inside the lines, his real colors, because they wanted him to look like the real thing. Heather laminated both printouts so they'd last the trip and eventually taped a big popsicle stick to the back of each, so he could be propped up for a picture. On hot travel days, he doubled as a fan.
His first photo was at the Colosseum.
It was Lucy's project, but Izzy was the one who kept asking for him. She loved that bear. The time Heather remembers best was Pisa: Izzy, right next to the Leaning Tower, wanting Paddington in the shot. The girls also kept a "Doggy Diary," and Paddington had to be in the picture with every random dog they found.
In St. Peter's Basilica, he posed in front of Michelangelo's Pietà, next to the girls' colored-in version of it.
Two or three times over the trip, whenever she had wifi, Heather wrote to Lucy's teacher at night. That was when she had more than a minute to think, and it was early evening back in Tennessee. Each email had a few lines about what we'd done, one fun fact about where we were, and a photo of Paddington or Lucy at the Colosseum, in Pisa, in a vibrant gelateria. The teacher told the class all about Paddington's trip. And she wrote back fast, every time.
After the Rome email:
"This makes me SO HAPPY! Thank you. I am grateful y'all are safely tucked in to Italy and to see that smile on Lucy's face. Have the best time!"
Lucy loved those replies.
How school actually fit inside 39 days in Italy
Mornings or nothing. School happened at breakfast, at the biggest table in each place we rented: worksheets, reading, writing. Heather tried to get Lucy's work done while Izzy was still asleep. On nice days, they took a blanket to the Park of Villa Strozzi al Boschetto or Piazza Tasso in Florence, or out to the yard at the farmhouse in Petrignano, and worked there for about an hour. If it didn't happen in the morning, Heather says, "there was a high likelihood that it ain't happenin' at all." The target was math, reading, writing, and grammar, at least three or four days a week.
Travel mornings. Full lessons on the online platform first, then one or two of the academy's worksheets. Done by the time we got where we were going.
What came with us. Whatever part of the plan fit in a carry-on.
Telling the school. A non-event. The academy doesn't set our attendance, so Heather let the teachers and the director know as a courtesy: how long we'd be gone and the date we'd be back. Mostly, they were jealous, and they asked for photos. Nothing was due on a hard date, so nothing ever collided with a travel day.
What it cost. The hybrid academy cost $5,255 for the 2024-25 school year, for both girls. Nothing was pro-rated for the 39 days we were gone. Heather's question going in was never whether school would hold up on the road. It was whether the academy was worth the money for the year. For us, it was. Measured against the research and planning Heather would have done building all of that curriculum herself, the time it saved her was worth the price.
We also paid for tours and museum entry in Florence: the Accademia Gallery, the Palazzo Vecchio, and the Duomo complex (the cathedral, Giotto's Bell Tower, and the Baptistery of San Giovanni). At April 2025 prices, entry for all four of us ran about €124. Both girls were free at the Accademia and the Palazzo Vecchio; on the Duomo's Giotto Pass, Lucy paid €7 and Izzy was free. Guided tours were extra. Every one of those entry fees was also a school morning. At the Accademia, the girls colored a picture of David underneath the real one.
What we got wrong
The Florence flat's kitchen-living-dining area looked a lot bigger in the Airbnb photos than it was. The kitchen table was the girls' school desk. It was also my office.
On mornings we had something planned downtown, school got pushed later, straight into my work meetings. So I packed up my whole setup and took client Zooms from the bedroom. I moved the bed to one side, rearranged the room so no client could tell where I was, and set my laptop on a stack of suitcases and a side table. Mosquitoes kept getting into that flat, too. I still don't know where they were coming from.
Now I check the listing photos for overlap. If the couch shows up behind the kitchen table, you're looking at one room shot twice.
And the bear didn't charm everybody. Lucy, whose project it was, would do three or four photos with him, then want him put away, or make Heather carry him. Heather's read on it: Lucy knew she was the only kid there holding a laminated Paddington on a stick.
We came home with one Paddington. Nobody has confessed.
What was different the second time
In Glasgow, the girls were six and four, and the plan bent to the day. Their attention, their temperament, whatever we wanted to prioritize as a family. Some mornings that meant a blanket in the back yard instead of the table. By Italy they were in grade school, and the bending happened around a list that had to get done anyway, mostly before we went anywhere.
Being enrolled didn't add obligations. Nothing at the academy is rigid or mandatory. "If anything," Heather says, "it added more fun!"
Looking back
I asked Heather what she remembers saying about school on that trip. Out loud, to anyone. A complaint would count. A half-joke would count.
"Just a lot of prayers."
She ran almost all of it: the mornings, the worksheets, the laminating, the late-night emails to Tennessee.
If we ran those 39 days again, the one thing I'd change is my part. I wish I'd participated more. Heather works so hard teaching our kids. My schedule allowed time for me to be more involved than I was.
In Italy, Lucy missed her teacher. So Heather emailed her and asked if she'd get on FaceTime with Lucy, just to say hi.
The teacher wrote back: "Of course! I am so grateful for her sweet heart." Further down the same email: "Oh! And you can tell Lucy I miss her too!"
They got on FaceTime. We were expecting a quick hello. They talked for an hour.
Wondering what this would look like for your family? The guide has the rest: how a 30-day anchor works, what a month abroad actually costs, and the records we keep so school counts.
