Moving to Bali with children — what the first month actually feels like
The thing nobody tells you about a year in Bali is that the first month is mostly waiting. Waiting for the school admissions to finish. Waiting for the household rhythm to settle. Waiting for the children to stop missing their best friends back home. We have watched enough families through their first month to know this is normal — and that it passes.
Week one: arrival fatigue. The flight is long, the heat is real, the children sleep at the wrong times for a week. Everyone is impressed by the villa, and by month two they will stop noticing it. The first week is for sleep, for swimming in the pool, and for going to bed when your bodies tell you to, even if it's seven in the evening.
Weeks two and three: school starts, in fits and starts. International schools in Bali run admissions thoroughly — meet-and-greets, taster days, sometimes formal assessment days. Your child may not be in a classroom on the first day. This is not a problem; this is the school being careful. Use the gap to walk to the school and back, to the warung your driver mentioned, sit at the warung, walk home. Build the geography of your week before you build the schedule.
Weeks three and four: the children's homesickness, and yours. Around day fifteen, a child will say they want to go home. Often two children, at slightly different times. The right response is not to fix it. The right response is to acknowledge it, hold them, and stay with the year. Most children pass through it by the end of the month. Most parents do too — they're feeling it themselves but not saying so.
What we do in the first month
During the first month we are deliberately closer than at any other point in the year. Your Director of Family Experience checks in two or three times a week. The concierge line answers anything. If there is a cohort dinner in your first month, we host it in your villa — you don't plan a single thing about it. We expect that the first month will produce questions; we are set up for them.
"Plan nothing for the first month except the basics. The memories will come, and they will be the small ones — the warung lady learning your son's name, the rain that comes at exactly 4pm and stops at 4:45."
What changes in month two
The school routine becomes a routine. The children make their first friends. You meet your second-week regulars at the warung and they recognise you. The villa stops feeling like a hotel and starts feeling like home. The view of Mount Agung on a clear morning becomes the view from your kitchen, not a photograph.
What we tell families before they arrive
Plan nothing for the first month except the basics. Don't book travel. Don't try to host friends from home. Don't set yourself work deadlines. Don't try to make memories. The memories will come, and they will be the small ones.
The second month is the one that turns. If you do the first month patiently, the year unfolds from it without you noticing. By month three, families call us less. By month six, they call us when something is unusually good — a Galungan ceremony invitation, a surprising bit of art class news — rather than when something is wrong.
A year in Bali is a long time. The first month is supposed to feel slow. Trust it.
— The Annum