Hopelessly Nomantic Family Update
Long time, no post.
I’d kind of considered parking this website. We stopped travelling, and during my pregnancy I lost absolutely all motivation to do anything involving my brain. However, the blog has been ticking over quite nicely despite me completely ignoring it – Theth post, I’m looking at you. It’s also been so lovely to hear from people who’ve read my posts and felt inspired <3 Thank you for your messages!
Then, a few weeks ago, like a bear climbing out of hibernation, my brain suddenly went: arghhhh I want to write things. I want to create. I want to do something. Then I remembered — I’ve got this well-running website, I live on a stunningly beautiful Greek island that’s still relatively unknown (at least to people from where I’m from), and… wait, what’s that? We’re back on the road in August?
So – yeah – here is the Hopelessly Nomantic relaunch!
We’re shifting focus. We are a family now. We have a house. We’ve become accustomed to more comfy beds. We also have a little (not so little) person with us.
(But this post isn’t about the blog — you can read more about the changes over on the new About page.)
So… what have we been up to this whole time?
After the enormously surprising news of my pregnancy — discovered while we were staying in Tbilisi, Georgia (a traumatic era, tbh) — we needed time to gather ourselves and come up with a plan. We spent a couple of months recovering from Georgia’s capital at Steffen’s parents’ place in Germany, and then headed to start our new life in Evia. (You can read more about why we chose to start our family in Greece here.)
We arrived with our backpacks and a vague idea of where we wanted to live – somewhere near Kalamata, on the Peloponnese. The rental market didn’t offer much online, but we hoped more options would appear once we were there in person. I spotted a listing in the village of Amarynthos, on an island I’d never even heard of, conveniently just 90 minutes from Athens. As it wasn’t much of a detour, we decided to stop by on our way south.
Spoiler alert: we never made it to Kalamata.
Driving down a quiet lane by the sea, lined with tamarisk trees, we pretty much decided before we’d even seen the house. We were so excited we called the landlady right away, even though our viewing was booked for the next day. She turned out to be super sweet, kind, and just as excited as we were. So, we cancelled our accommodation in Kalamata, bought a bed, and moved in the next day.
Of course, then began all the fun we’d successfully avoided by not living anywhere:
Mountains of paperwork. Trying to find people who could help with said paperwork (very hard). Learning that Greek maternity care can be a total nightmare (but also discovering there are wonderful people if you know where to look). Buying a car. Buying everything for a house. And a child.
One of many, many shopping trips
Would I recommend doing all this five months pregnant? No.
Am I happy now, a year later? Absolutely.
Do I have a visa yet? 100% not. But apparently, that’s normal…
The Heat, the Bureaucracy, the Baby
The next few months were:
a) very hot (July and August routinely hit 40°C)
b) very busy.
It felt like every time we thought “Right, that must be everything now,” there was more stuff to buy or do. Greek bureaucracy is – as I expected – clunky and painfully slow. No one seemed to know what we were supposed to do to register our residency. No one wanted the job of helping us do it. Eventually, we found a brilliant accountant who now sorts everything out. We’re just… waiting.
I found it all incredibly stressful at the time, but at this point, I’ve honestly stopped caring.
Our baby was due in November, so the next big task was finding doctors and figuring out the Greek health system. I’ll write a separate post about this because my initial research made me very nervous about giving birth in Greece.
Greece is known for having a high c-section rate and lots of medical intervention — and yes, that’s absolutely true. But I found the most wonderful healthcare professionals to support me, and I genuinely don’t think I could have had a better experience anywhere. It would have been reassuring to read some positive stories about the Greek system, so I’ll be adding mine soon.
And then, after what felt like the world’s longest pregnancy (and it was long— 42 weeks!), our whole universe flipped upside down.
Our little boy arrived earthside.
We were — and still are — flooded with feelings: joy and wonder at his little face each morning. Constant surprise at how fast he changes. Exhaustion yet some strange, inexhaustible energy that comes from nowhere. And daily gratitude to the universe for sending us this boy.
We were launched into a crash course in patience, slowing down, and personal growth. Learning that it’s possible to want time to stop and to desperately crave five minutes alone at the same time.Then you get five minutes alone… and you feel guilty.
And somehow, six months have already passed. Now everything is already easier. So, naturally, I wish time would slow down again.
Every day is a learning curve — for him, for us. We make mistakes. We course-correct. We get more confident. I remember the day we walked out of the hospital, exhausted (Steffen had slept on the floor next to me for two nights), and it took us 30 minutes to figure out the baby car seat on that cold winter day in Athens. I felt completely helpless.
Now I feel like a lioness or something.
I didn’t realise how much having a child would make me reflect on my own behaviour. But it has already transformed our lifestyle and habits in a way that only feels right. Our hopes and dreams for Heinz’s future health and happiness depend on us becoming the best versions of ourselves. And there is no greater motivation.
So, emotional stream-of-consciousness on parenthood: complete… We now have a strapping 12 kg six-month-old who seems set on self-determined movement before we’re ready for it. We’ve found a lovely circle of friends on the island — a mix of locals and other foreigners. We have a little nest here. And now that we’re settled… We can’t wait to leave for the next adventure.
AI Disclaimer
AI was used during the writing process for this post.
What is AI?
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is not ‘intelligent’. It doesn’t think or understand—it’s trained to predict and complete text based on patterns it has seen before. It works by breaking your input into chunks called tokens (which can be whole words, parts of words, or even punctuation) and then predicts the most statistically likely next token, one after the other, to generate a response.
The better your prompt, the better the response generated.
