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 drive the school route once with your driver, stop at a warung on the way, sit a while, come home the slow way. Build the geography of your week before you build the schedule.

Weeks three and four: the children’s homesickness, and yours. Often around the midpoint of the first month, a child may 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. Many children pass through it within the first month or so. 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 Family Host checks in two or three times a week. The Family Host line takes anything practical. If an Annum dinner falls in your first month, everything about the evening is already arranged — 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. At the warung, you are greeted as a regular. 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.

For many families, 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, many families are calling us less. By month six, the calls are often about something unusually good — a new friendship, a surprising bit of art-class news — rather than anything wrong.

A year in Bali is a long time. The first month is supposed to feel slow. Trust it.

Two companion notes: how to take a sabbatical year with children, and where families base themselves.

Author: The Annum  ·  Published: May 2026  ·  Last updated: June 2026

— The Annum