Guest Post from Jacob
I am not
working, so friends and family from home have diplomatically asked me what the hell I do all
day. Thus below I provide my rough schedule. (I’m not
just lazing about! 4.5 hours a day without children turns out to be time that it is easy
to fill.) I also have put below some of the highlights of what we had to do to
make this trip happen.
Jacob’s
Typical Sabbatical
Day
5:30 AM: wake up from noisy animals and light
streaming through the “windows” – screens with no glass and no curtains -- and then
try to grab my eyeglasses and phone without waking Yonit or Shiloh. Shiloh
sneaks into our bed almost every night. In rural Costa Rica, where bats and
geckos sometimes sneak into our house, and screaming howler monkeys play on our
roof, sleep training is out of the question.
6:30 AM: everyone is awake and we’re tackling
our morning “get ready to do” list: The
kids have to pee, brush teeth, clothes and sun block on, and eat, and the
parents have to pack snacks, water bottles, a change of clothes. Without
pointing fingers, suffice it to say that at least one of the four of us usually
has something better to do, and so is obstinately refusing to do the assigned
tasks, and this can cause tension. You may not believe this, but occasionally there
is even yelling.
7:45 AM: drop the kids off at the school bus, or
drive them to school myself (20 minutes roundtrip).
8:30 AM – 9:30 AM: workout time! A five-minute
walk away there’s a pool and a workout area where classes are held. For a while
I took a boxing-sparring class until I got punched in the eye, causing one of
my contact lenses to go flying. Between that and my back hurting, I gave it up.
Next, I hired a private swim coach for $20 a lesson to improve my swim
technique, and am now swimming laps for the first time in my life (where we're staying, from 10 AM to 5 PM it's typically about 90 degrees outside). When I’m not
swimming or getting beaten up, I do my personal back routine at home (side and
forward planks, regular and wide squats, clam shells, etc., plus the occasional
pushup).
9:30 AM – 2 PM: Yonit is working and I’m usually
handling practical adult tasks, like submitting health insurance claims or
searching for a landlord homeowner’s insurance policy (so fun!). My favorite
days are when I can convince Yonit to play hooky from work for an hour or two
and swim in the nearby river. I’ve also
been taking Spanish lessons; volunteering a few hours a week at a retirement
home, where I practice my Spanish (see photo below of me and my friend Julia,
an septuagenarian Tica who is single and available :), standing in front of the
community pool); and conducting legal research for my brother Reuben. He’s a forensic
psychiatrist writing an article about involuntarily medicating mentally ill patients.
Innocuous topic, right?
2:15 – 3 PM: prep snacks for the kids and pick
them up from school. In New York, on weekdays I usually don’t see my kids till
6 PM, so I’m getting a lot more time with them.
3 PM-5:30 PM: post-school activities, including reading,
playing soccer with a local team (Shiloh holds his own!), and swimming at the pool
that’s within walking distance of our home. I’m so proud to report that Adira and Shiloh are swimming and reading on their own, respectively. Oh and I nearly
forgot to mention, we also spend a lot of time talking with Adira in jibberish
(she has many non-English-speaking classmates, so I guess this is her way of processing this?)
5:30 PM eat
dinner, always at home, as there are few nearby restaurants. Another complaint I
have is that the "super" markets within driving distance don't have
organic food, which is maybe ironic given that we're literally living in the
jungle.
7-8 PM: we’re putting the kids to bed. Nothing
remarkable to report except that Adira loves to pinching us as she goes to bed,
and it hurts! But once we get her still, she passes out in ten seconds. Kids
are remarkable creatures.
8 PM: Yonit and I clean up dinner, which is no
small job, as our house lacks a dishwasher (I assume as some kind of unfortunate
nod to the “eco villa” name of our gated community), and a job that must be
done quickly, given the fearless ants, which within minutes can come in such numbers that they're capable of carrying away portions of our leftovers, and lizards, whose presence we're aware of primarily because of the poops they leave on a regular basis on our bed. After cleaning up, we exhaustedly stare at our phones, plan our
next travels, and debate whether we’re really moving back to New York in
September (we are).
9 PM: Yonit and I go to bed and try to stay
awake long enough to make headway reading a book. I recently finished Trust by
Hernan Diaz and highly recommend it, and am now trying to make my way through The
Wind Knows My Name by Isabelle Allende in the original Spanish.
What we had
to do to set up our trip and leave New York
We began
planning for the trip nearly a year in advance. We had to make so many
decisions, and had to depend on good will from so many other people, I’m not
sure we would or could ever do this again. Here are some of the highlights of
our preparation process.
- Children’s schools:
- In late January 2024 we managed to persuade Adira’s
school to allow her to attend for only half the year. If they hadn’t agreed, we
would have had to choose between enrolling her in a random public school for
six months, or tried to postpone our trip and hope that the new federal government administration (my employer) would allow me to take a leave of absence from work. We LOVED Adira’s school, Congregation Beth Elohim, and are
so thankful they granted our request.
- Also in January 2024, following an extensive
search, we found an au pair who would be ok living with us and then leaving
around the time we planned to leave New York. The kids still miss Delfina, an
even-keeled Argentinian who stayed with us until two days before we departed for
our adventures.
- A year later, in January 2025, Shiloh’s school
PS 321 emailed to say we had to disenroll him within the next five days, or we’d
face a Department of Education truancy investigation. So we disenrolled him. For now we’re
just hoping they’ll let him and Adira in starting in September 2025. I suppose
we can’t pat ourselves on the back for this one.
- Persuade the bilingual Costa Rica private school
to take our children for only three months, despite their stated policy. We
didn’t want to have to commit upfront to spend the entire sabbatical in one
place.
- Careers:
- In late April 2024, I went to my boss and argued
that after eleven years of service, I deserved some unpaid leave. My request
was ultimately granted, I think in part because my office probably would not
get hiring authority to replace me if I quit, and because my office doesn’t
have many ways to reward senior employees, as our salaries are set by Congress.
Anyway, I’m so thankful for having understanding supervisors.
- A couple months later, Yonit informed her
supervisors that she’d be leaving her position at Maimonides, where she had
been working for seven years. She also applied for and won a grant (through
Maimonides) that she could manage part time from wherever we travel.
- Shortly before we left, I downloaded a
few writing samples in case I get fired while on leave. Lots of exciting
changes happening in Washington these days!
- House:
- In June 2024 we hired real estate agent Terry
Baum (whom I highly recommend) to rent out our house in Brooklyn. Among other things, Terry
transformed our place for a photo shoot, fielded numerous inquiries, and took
maybe a dozen different prospective tenants on walkthroughs until we got a good
offer. Before each walkthrough, Yonit or I raced around the house for an hour
trying to organize and hide the chaos of our messy family life.
- Go through nearly every item in our house, and discard it, give it away, or move it to our basement . This was mentally and physically exhausting, and in the end we did
not discard nearly enough.
- Fix nonworking things around the house that we had
gotten used to, but surely our tenants wouldn’t like. I still can’t believe how
much bathroom faucets cost to replace.
- Provide our new tenants with a 4.5-page document
detailing everything related to the house. (OK maybe this wasn’t critical.)
- Car:
- For our 2016 beat-up Volvo V60 hatchback sedan, after
we considered numerous options, our one set of relatives who live in the New
York suburbs agreed to store it drive it occasionally (major thank you to Yonit’s
sister Ayelet and her husband Ari).
- Car rentals in Costa Rica are so expensive, but
a couple weeks before we moved we found someone renting out a 2008 Honda CRV
with 130,000 miles for "just" $1,200 a month (the market rate is $2,000 per month; CR is expensive!). Costa Rican roads are often unpaved
and extremely bumpy, and supposedly that was the only reason the owner gave us detailed
instructions on how I should check under the hood at least every two weeks. He
also told us not to worry about the fact that the car has several warning
lights that are always on. On the bright side, I now know what transmission
fluid does, and the car has broken down only once in the middle of the road.
- Visas: Fortunately a visa isn’t
needed for Costa Rica, so we actually had to do nothing for this. But for a while we were thinking of going to Spain, which requires a visa to stay for more than three months, so we met with multiple attorneys and even started working on the visa application process, until we realized that we probably wouldn't qualify, and turned our sights back on Costa Rica.
- Pre-travel purchases: We had to buy so
many things, like new health insurance with international coverage, a kindle
for Shiloh so we could easily get him new books while in rural Costa Rica, a
three-month supply of medications from our mail order pharmacy, and a scooter
suitcase for Adira, so that she wouldn’t dawdle in the airports and keep up
with Shiloh on his. Our kids get stares in every airport they scoot through.
For want of a better word. No one is paying me right now, except for our
tenants, so maybe the term “sabbatical” is misleading. But “gap year,”
“micro-retirement,” and “extended unpaid leave” also don’t seem quite right. I
welcome suggestions.
