Quick Links

📝 Command the Chaos – The Mum Life Management Planner https://shorturl.at/bbzm7

☕ Support the Show – help keep the kettle on and the podcast going https://the-real-life-real-kitchen.captivate.fm/support

She Left a Fortune 500 Career For Motherhood

What happens when motherhood completely changes the direction of your life?

In this episode, I chat with Monica Virga Alborno, founder of Wandherwild Family Retreats, about how she left a successful career in the oil industry to create family wellness retreats where children are not simply accommodated; they're part of the experience.

We explore the realities of modern motherhood, birth trauma, building community, family travel and what it means to create a slower, more intentional life. Monica also shares how years working in a global Fortune 500 company shaped her leadership, why she believes children benefit from experiencing wellness alongside their parents, and even gives us an insider's look at the world of oil and global economics.

If you've ever wondered whether motherhood can completely reshape your priorities, this conversation is full of encouragement and thoughtful reflection.

In This Episode You'll Learn

✅ Why motherhood transformed Monica's career and life direction.

✅ How Wandherwild’s family wellness retreats include children from the very beginning.

✅ What birth trauma taught Monica about slowing down.

✅ Why community matters so much in modern motherhood.

✅ How corporate leadership prepared her for entrepreneurship.

✅ What life inside the global oil industry is really like.

About Today's Guest

Monica Virga Alborno is the founder of Wanderwild Family Retreats, creating child-inclusive wellness retreats for modern families. A former Fortune 500 energy engineering executive, she now helps parents reconnect through nature, travel and community while raising her own family in Norway.

Guest Links

🌿 https://www.wanderwildfamilyretreats.com/

📸 https://www.instagram.com/wandherwild/

🎙 https://www.wanderwildfamilyretreats.com/wandherwild-podcast

About Real Life. Real Kitchen.

Mum-of-six, Zoë, set up Real Life. Real Kitchen. as a podcast and corner of the internet to help overwhelmed mamas create calmer homes through practical food, simple home systems and honest conversations about modern motherhood.

If you're looking for realistic encouragement to make family life feel more connected and less chaotic, subscribe for a new episode every week.

This episode explores family wellness retreats, modern motherhood, birth trauma, family travel, community, entrepreneurship, wellness retreats for families and how motherhood can inspire a completely new direction in life.

💌 Join The Kitchen Correspondence – Real Life. Real Kitchen's weekly newsletter with episodes, reflections & family food wisdom https://realliferealkitchen.myflodesk.com/socials

Foreign.

Hello everybody and welcome to the Real Life Real Kitchen podcast.

I have on today the wonderful Monica Virgo Alborno.

Now, Monica is very impressive.

She has been featured in Forbes, Glamour, Business Insider and more and is a former Fortune 500 energy engineering executive turned entrepreneur.

What she's gone into now is actually family wellness traveling and she founded Wonderwild Family Retreats.

This is the only established retreat company in the Americas that openly welcomes children.

And I think this is a really important thing with holistic child inclusive travel experiences for family.

She's also the host of the top 10% globally ranked the Wand, her wild podcast.

Now, before all of this happened, Monica originally came from New Jersey, but is now based in Norway of all places.

This is as a result of a 14 year expatriate career working in the oil industry, visiting more than 80 countries and she's blessed with two children that she's traveling the world with.

So I thought Monica desperately interesting person.

We have a podcast which is of two and a half parts.

I'll say.

I really want to have a look at your background in the oil industry.

We're going to go a bit geopolitics considering the times in which we live.

And then I really want to talk about the transition and your focus on these in person community motherly retreats, if that's something you'd be up for.

Yeah, absolutely.

Thank you, Zoe, for that beautiful introduction.

My heart feels so warm right now and just thanks for having me.

I'm happy to be here.

Thank you so much.

Monica, now you've come from New Jersey.

How did you end up in Bergen in Norway?

Because that's quite a, quite a journey.

Could you give me a little bit of that, that background?

Yeah, it was career driven but also I would say very much like me manifesting or really just like envisioning where I wanted my life to take me.

When I was in a university, still university student.

Towards my last like two years in undergraduate studies, my bachelor's, I knew I wanted to have an international career.

So I was seeking out opportunities to work for a big corporation because that's usually the ones who would hire an American and be able to sponsor you in different countries and continuously move around without me having to like keep finding a new company in different countries.

All over.

Yeah.

So luckily, yeah, I was also going.

To say the corporates are quite good in this respect because they can do all the paperwork and you've got the safety net if you're going somewhere truly exotic and dangerous.

So, yes, there's a lot To a lot going for them in that respect.

It was, it really was ideal for me at the time.

Um, so in my.

I guess I was 24, was still in university when I was hired by this energy company who's now diversified in some different types of energy.

But at the time they were primarily oil and gas.

I mean they still really are but they are diversifying a little bit with the times because I mean we're still consuming it.

Right.

I mean I'm looking at all the plastic I'm surrounded by.

It's, it's around you all the time.

If people notice that everything.

Oil, oil.

So yes.

So that was pretty cool is that I was hired by this company that was in.

Has a hundred and a hundred thousand employees in like I think a hundred plus countries around the world and I could just kind of have this what they call a borderless career which means you can continuously keep moving through your whole career if you want.

I mean I decided to settle where I am now but that's how I ended up.

It was really career driven and also I really just felt this pull to travel in a way that felt sustainable and kind of a little bit like responsible.

Like I knew I could get a paycheck every month.

Had you know, we were all living in this company housing so I was living in a community of all people I worked with.

We were all expats together.

They as you said, they take care of like relocation and like your visas and your work permits, all that kind of stuff.

And also it was a really nice like way to get into it in my twenties what strikes me as well the good thing.

So I was.

Had an expatriate childhood also oil company.

So this is all sounding very, very familiar to me.

But what's also quite special about the expatriate community because people know you're only there for a short time, like two, three, four years maybe.

Everybody makes a huge effort as soon as you arrive.

You know you've got this window of maybe four, five, six months where everyone's like come to the parties, come to the barbecues, come to all the things and people get very good at creating community.

Yeah, it's.

Yeah, yeah.

Particularly if you're on the compounds in the hot countries where you've got the swimming pools, the barbecues, blah blah blah.

It's, it's, it's a real privilege to have that.

It's very cool.

We used to sit around the table and we'd be like, we're like, we're like the unofficial UN because we'd have 30 people sitting there and 30 people were from 30 different countries.

Like it was pretty crazy, you know, to share a table and a meal and drinks in that way.

So that was pretty cool.

But yeah, I ended up in Kuwait first and that's where I was in the Middle east for almost three years.

That's where I met my husband.

He was a work colleague and we started a dual career together.

So we said, if you want to move us, you gotta move us together because we're dating and we're still figuring this out, but we don't want to be separated in different continents.

And so we ended up in Sub Saharan Africa together while we were dating and we started living together.

Yeah, and then we, yeah, and then we got married somewhere in there and we ended up in Norway almost five years after that.

And we had the plans to continue moving from here, but we really fell in love with Norway.

We really fell in love with the lifestyle here.

We had been working previously, like 16 hour days, six days a week.

When you're on this like global contract, the work day is, is, it's, it's a six day week.

And the work hours, because a lot of the people are rotational and coming and going.

As you said, you're only there a couple years.

The expectations for work are just, they really take over your life because you're, you're living around everybody you're working with.

So it's kind of like that's all you're doing.

Yeah, I, I've got one question.

In terms of what you, you were doing, were you actually working on the rigs at the kind of the coal face, if you will, was that the sort of work or was it more kind of back office?

So it, it evolved over the years.

I started as a field engineer when I was in Kuwait when I was in my 20s.

So I was going to the rigs with a crew.

At first I was part of the crew and then I was managing the crews pretty quickly.

The company I was working for, they put you in stretch positions.

So they tend to put you in positions that you're not ready for yet as an engineer.

And you have to learn on the job.

It's a lot of experiential learning.

So yeah, I was, I was maybe six months into the company when I started supervising crews of a bunch of guys from the Middle east and North Africa.

And you know, there's this little blonde American girl being like, yalla, let's go to the rig.

Yeah, yalla, yalla.

It's Time,.

You know.

So yeah, that was a cool experience.

I was a field engineer for most of my time in Kuwait and then I got a little bit into the technical engineering and design work there.

Then when I went to Angola, I was a technical and sales engineer in big client name offices that we all see when we pull into the gas stations.

So all those kinds of companies and I would sit in house for them and do technical design work and selling new technologies and things like that.

And then I would go offshore sometimes if we were implementing something that was like higher tech.

And then I moved into management and I was a field service manager.

So I was managing the engineers, the supervisors, the maintenance department, the laboratory, like a goodness a lot of stuff.

And then I decided, well, I didn't really decide the company decided I was doing it so well that they were going to give me all of sub Saharan Africa.

So by the time I left Angola, I was not even really living in Angola at the time.

I was moving around sub Saharan Africa quite a bit.

I was managing operations in a territory of almost 30 countries with like 14 of them active.

And every country we had new startups happening from like ultra deep water off the shores of West Africa to the jungles of Mozambique, like just really like off grid jungle.

So it was cool.

I that part I was mainly in the office, but I would go sometimes for audits or like if we had a big project starting with just something that had a lot of eyes on it because they were important projects happening, then I would go to the rig.

But yeah, it was, it was cool.

I got to travel a lot.

I got to go a lot of places that are not on the tourist trails.

No, you know, I got to like talk to a lot of locals and really see how life is.

We had rolling blackouts and lots of traffic and convoys to go, you know, from the office and home a lot because of security reasons.

And we had barbed wired fences with, with you know, security guards where we lived.

And yeah, it was, it was interesting and I really appreciate where I am at right now for, for those years and I learned a lot.

It's quite a contrast.

I mean I, I lived in Nigeria with, with the oil and I remember when we moved there it was very much buy all your stuff from IKEA for the flat.

Don't bring anything precious because if you get a call in the middle of the night because there's a military coup, you've just got to leave your stuff.

So there's that.

And I still am in the habit when we get in the car and I.

You get your, your kind of antennae go up and you're sort of suburban London or something and you go, might just lock the car.

Might just click.

Just make sure all the locks are there.

So there's.

No, not that I believe there is any carjacking going on in London at the moment.

When it's in you, it's in you.

That's.

That's for sure.

That's for sure.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

But how it is embedded in you.

Oh, my goodness.

I'm going to.

I'm going to come back to sort of oil as a product and sort of economic impact upon mothers today.

But you've gone from that and now you're a mummy.

You're a mummy, Monica.

And you have these beautiful website, wellness retreat for families.

That's quite a contrast from, you know, deep shore, deep offshore rigs and the jungles of Mozambique looking for oil.

How did, how did that happen?

Yeah, I mean, anyone who knew me like 10 years ago would probably not guess this is where life was gonna take me, because I was.

I really ended up leaving my, my corporate career at the height of it.

Like, I could have kept climbing.

And I was just continuously praised from the outside that you've got what it takes to, to be a leader in this company of a hundred thousand employees, you know, and it made.

It didn't make rational sense from the outside that I decided to let it all go.

But for me, inward, like an inner knowing from me, it makes total sense where I am right now.

And I think the whole thing was becoming a mom for me.

It was as soon as I became a mom and I went on that journey of even becoming pregnant, it just really opened up the feminine side of me more.

I was living in the masculine for so long.

If this is making sense.

Anyone listening?

I was just.

Yes.

You know, in the, in the oil industry, I was usually the only woman in the room.

I was very often the only woman on the rig site or in the room with a group of people.

Anywhere I went, I was the girl.

Like, I was around a lot of male energy and I had to embody that a lot because that's how management, you know, generally in a big corporation, Fortune 500, that's what they expect from you.

And so having to now go more into the nurturing side, the feminine side, the intuitive side, connecting with my womb, like that womb space, I didn't really even, like, have a choice.

It just kind of all of a sudden clicked for me that I, I really needed to get back to what it.

What is my inner knowing telling me?

What have I been ignoring and where do I really want to go?

Like, if I'm not thinking about all the outside praise, the money, the social status, the like all those things, like, where do I really see my life going in the future?

And that's when it started just happening.

I became a mom during the pandemic.

For any pandemic moms out there.

And we were very isolated.

Yeah, I had first time mom as well.

First time mom, crazier.

I'm in a foreign country, so my family couldn't be here.

It's just my husband and I. I had birth trauma.

I had difficulty getting pregnant from the beginning.

Had a miscarriage, took us two years.

Then I finally have my baby and I end up with birth trauma.

I had this vision of how I wanted it to be.

Did not go as planned.

My husband has to leave the hospital right away because of the pandemic.

He can't even stay.

And my daughter and I are alone in the hospital for over a week.

Her birth weight is dropping.

My milk supply is not coming in.

I was just really having this vision of motherhood with this newborn baby sleeping on my chest.

And that like, was not happening for us.

And it was a lot more difficult than I had ever imagined.

And nobody told me this kind of stuff can happen.

So I'm like, I feel like people are talking about it more now, which is refreshing.

Yeah.

But like to be prepared.

It's a fine balance.

I mean, yeah, it's a fine balance because there is also.

You don't want to terrify, terrify people.

Mums or mums to be.

You don't want to frighten them because we all emerge.

Yes, there will be scars, there will be trauma, but there can also be greatness from the suffering.

And yeah, it's just a tricky.

It's a tricky balance.

I'm not quite sure what the answer is.

I think.

I agree.

I think there are more and more people talking about birth trauma and sort of effects it has afterwards.

Then, well, you've got a healthy baby, what's the problem?

Shuffle on.

Great.

Crack on.

Which isn't.

Which isn't helpful, but I think, yes, maybe this acknowledgement of this was hard, awful, frightening, all the things.

And you're not alone.

Because I think a lot of women will think, oh, it was just me.

I'm the one who's gone through this.

And that's a very painful, painful thing.

So.

Absolutely.

And yeah, you're right, it's.

Everyone's experience is Different.

My second child, I had a natural, unmedicated VBAC and a really beautiful experience.

You know, it's just.

And.

And I learned so much from my first birth.

Like, now that time has passed that was supposed to happen, and as I was getting to, that's what inspired me to end up creating what I'm creating.

And, um, if I hadn't gone through that, I may have just gone right back to my career that I was pursuing very, like, mindlessly.

But that really kicked something in me.

Like, wow, there's a lot to this motherhood thing and this parenthood thing.

And I'm learning a lot about myself.

Letting go, trusting the connection between my kids is so important.

And what can I learn from them?

Like, it's a balance between what can I guide them in and what can they also heal within me and guide me to do to better myself and grow as a person?

So I found it all really fascinating, and I started exploring it more, and I was like, well, I would really love to go to a retreat, a transformational wellness retreat I had gone to before as a single person, before I had kids that I want to bring my kids with me.

I think it would be cool to have them along.

At the time, she was a newborn, so I'm breastfeeding.

I'm like, I. I kind of have to bring her along.

And there's not really anything out there.

You can find things where, like, I mean, there really wasn't at the time, anything.

And even now, there's.

There's more starting to emerge, which is.

Which is beautiful.

But a lot of the times your kid is, like, a second thought, like, bring them along and we'll have a nanny watch them bring them along.

There's like a childcare program, but is there a place where, like, your kid is fully immersed in a wellness retreat themselves?

And that's what I wanted to create, and that's what I did.

It's all about the mom comes and gets a transformational retreat experience, but also the kid comes as a guest and they also have a retreat experience at a young age and get exposed to so many.

So many tools to really have to help them get to know themselves better.

Love the podcast and want to help keep the kettle on.

You can support the show.

Think of it like buying me a cup of tea or helping cover the cost of the biscuits.

You'll find the link in the show notes.

Thank you for keeping this kitchen conversation going.

Goodness, yes.

And I think that's because that's what it's about, you know, Families are all connected.

It's not just like the mum is one separate unit, the child is a separate unit, the dad's a separate unit.

It's having it all together and that the connectivity between them all is really important.

When you had this moment of I want to go on this wellness retreat, was it then a case of, right, well, I'm just going to sort of research how to put this all together because obviously you had been project managing other things in the past.

So how have you found the contrast between big, big projects and setting up your own business?

Yeah, I mean, in, in a lot of ways, like, my corporate career provided me a lot of the skills that I needed to do this because I knew, like, I'm not a yoga instructor and I don't want to be.

I don't, you know, I have some background in working with children through a lot of, like, volunteer work and things, but, like, I don't want to become a certified, like, school teacher.

Like, I knew, like, that wasn't my role in all this, but my role was to find the right people to be a part of it.

And I had worked in talent management before I left the company I was working for.

I was actually doing talent management and a lot of, like, recruiting and career development for engineers all across continental Europe, so for over a thousand employees.

And so I had a lot of understanding too, of just like, what you're looking for and the people you're hiring.

And.

And I had been doing a lot of energy work, which is kind of checking in with my intuition and like, who feels right to be a part of this space because it is a very sacred space that we're holding when we bring people together in this way.

And I take it very, very seriously who we invite to be a part of holding that space.

And so that really allowed me to find the right people that we needed and understand, like, the staffing model we needed and what roles we needed to fill.

And I'm the one who's really the anchor holding everything together.

I'm holding the vision of what the retreat is going to feel like and the activity program as a whole, and also guiding and giving a vision to each of the facilitators as to what their role is and, you know, what they're facilitating.

Yeah, if that makes sense.

When your daughter was born, that really got quite enhanced and focused.

Had that always been there?

Was it something that got pushed down or was it something you went, oh, I didn't realize that was there.

I didn't know I had that within me.

What was your sort of.

What happened there?

Yeah, I think I had always been pretty attuned with like where I, where I.

How am I gonna say this?

Like where I wanted to go, the path I wanted to take throughout life and for me and my like 24 year old me, like being like, I'm gonna have this international career all over the world.

I'm gonna go live in sub Saharan Africa.

And it all somehow happened like there was always this inner compass that like I believed that it was going to happen.

So like the inner kind of guidance of the compass moving around was moving me from place to place.

But I think somewhere in there you also get really like conditioned to just follow the shiny things.

Like the things that are, are giving you outside praise and then you lose it a little bit.

So I even remember like my inner, my kind of like my like pre matern, my maternity leave interview I had with a bunch of executives from the company and I'm like, oh yeah, I'm gonna come back really quickly.

Like maybe I'll give part of my leave to my husband so I can come back even earlier and just like jump it.

But like I, I really knew inside that like I didn't want to do that.

I was kind of doing it because they wanted me to.

Yeah.

And then when she was born, I'm, I'm like, no, I'm gonna take my full leave.

Like, no, I don't want to relocate to another place.

I'm gonna stay here, even if that means I'm taking a step back from where I could have been.

So there was something that definitely kicked in.

When you all of a sudden have another, another person that you're.

That's looking up to you too.

Right.

And is watching how I'm moving through the world, that really kicked in for me to, to connect back with that, that inner knowing, that creativity piece of me that was lost for a while.

Yeah.

And so, gosh, God bless your daughter.

What a gift.

What a gift.

What a trigger.

What a trigger.

So I'm going to go back to oil because we're living in exciting times.

There has been a little bit of an altercation between Iran and the US and there is this tiny passage of water in the Middle east which has got quite tight and oil isn't coming through.

I'm giving a brief summary.

Why is this a problem?

Why is this a problem?

Monica, let's take it back to basics.

I want real kind of Economics 101, what's happening?

What's going on?

Yeah.

Okay, so there's A couple things I can share.

It's generally all about supply and demand and the flow, like the usability for flow and distribution.

So anytime that's off balance, it's going to affect the, the price.

So like what we see as consumers, I guess the easiest way to put it is like how much your it is to fill your car with fuel or even like the prices for creating materials that we are using, products, we're using that, that have oil in them.

That can change just based on the demand.

There's going to be less supply when we have something like that happen and therefore more demand.

So that's really the basics of it.

All of the like, political stuff, like, you know, some is opinionated, right?

Like, because, yeah, we can leave that.

To the side for now.

But certainly in terms of kind of the economics.

So you've got.

But supply and demand.

So my question would be, you've got.

Iran is not able.

It's not sending it out because it's all blocked and all of that.

So we've got this great reduction.

But why can't other places like Angola or Nigeria or, you know, obviously the US Is a big.

Is like one of the world's biggest suppliers these days.

Why can't they just up their production and fill that gap?

Yeah, well, I mean, it is kind of political because everybody has their own relationships, their own contracts, like their own distribution between different countries.

So there's a whole grid of the way resources are distributed throughout the world.

And also like, you can't necessarily always increase the production everywhere.

Like some fields are more depleted than others and the flow is different, I guess, if that makes sense.

Like there's just, there's a lot involved.

But what I generally have seen working, I'm not like in it every day right now.

My husband still works in the industry, so I see him every day still.

You know, he's in supply chain, so I see him still being a part of it.

But I mean, what I had seen over over a decade, you know, 13 years as an industry was we went through a lot of upturns and downturn cycles and most of them were drawn by wars, by any conflict, by the stock market.

Like anything that was, was moving economically would affect the supply and demand.

And it kind of, it just always came back to that there's always going to be more demand for oil when a war happens.

Yeah, like, yeah, I mean, so that's if that makes sense.

One last question about oil.

Is it all the same or do you get different sorts from different parts of the world or is it just all this black sticky stuff?

No, yeah, that's a good question.

Yeah, there are different types and like it's refined differently.

So I was always part of the process, process of extracting the oil from the ground.

I was part of the drilling part.

So I worked in well integrity, which was about drilling a well.

And.

I want to try to explain this in a way that someone's going to understand listening.

I would be part of the process of drilling the well and then being able to produce from the well in a way that doesn't.

That in a way that keeps the integrity.

So in a way that it doesn't contaminate the water tables around it, doesn't contaminate the porous rocks around it and also keeps it intact.

Because when you're putting so much pressure under, especially like when you're talking about ultra deep water, you could be a mile under the water.

So there's all that pressure and then you're in the rock formation itself and then you're.

To extract it, you have to apply like a fluid flow.

And yeah, you want to make sure that nothing's fractured that shouldn't be in certain areas or that it's just controlled.

The pressures are all controlled and balanced.

So that was my part was to really find out a way to do that in the drilling phase.

And there's a whole other sector that's part of production and then referring refining the oil.

But depending on where you're extracting oil from, like there's heavy oil that we used to drill in like in Kuwait.

In parts of Kuwait, there's other, like, there's all different types that come out of the ground and they have to be refined differently and they can be used.

Depending on what if it's gonna be plastics and things.

Is that correct?

Yeah.

Right.

And also natural gas as well.

Yeah.

Another, another thing complicated this modern world, isn't it?

Very complicated, yeah.

So the whole like.

Yeah, I think a lot of people don't really understand like how oil is even brought up from the earth because it is inside all these tiny little pores of rock.

And you have to find like with.

There's a lot of like geology that is done to even locate where they are.

And then you have to do exploratory wells to find out if you've found the right place geologically.

And then once you know that, you can start developing the field and then it's depleted and then you have to maybe use that for storage in the future.

So there's like.

Yeah, there's a whole life cycle to all of it and a lot of different pieces.

So this is.

I am in awe of your mind and the minds of the people who work in this industry because that is just not how my mind works.

It's just amazing.

Just incredible.

Yeah, just incredible.

So we're going to shift back to Wand Hill Wild and the retreats.

So these are happening not in places like Kuwait and Angola, even though you are familiar with them.

But you are looking mainly over in the U.S. aren't you for a lot of these retreats.

Yeah.

So right now they were originally started in the northeastern part of the US and right now we're hosting them in upstate New York.

We have had them, we had one in Florida, we've had some in Cape Cod, Massachusetts, like outside of Boston.

But I've kind of been keeping it in the Northeast because that's where I'm originally from.

I, I feel just like, I don't know, an intuitive knowing they're knowing that the moms in that area really need it because I, I know what it's like to grow up in that area and it's very.

We get a lot of Manhattan moms that are.

Yeah, it's just a fast paced lifestyle where you're really in this like autopilot mode and they just seem like they need it the most.

But we do have people come that travel from all over the states, Canada, even internationally because there aren't many options to, to really experience something like this.

So we'll see where it goes.

I would love to bring it more places but I also, I'm really particular where we host because it has to be a place that again, it's such a sacred space.

It has to be a place that has like good energy and has the things that we need too.

Like in this specific place that we host at, there's two villas.

Every single mom gets their own room with their own bathroom.

Love to it.

Which is just, it's really important when you have tiny, tiny kids to have that.

There's a lot of living areas like little tiny nooks and crannies for privacy, a lot of outdoor space.

We have the property to ourselves so you can let kids roam a little bit and not be worried.

There's animals on property.

There's a pond, there's a pool.

We have our own commercial kitchen so we can cook all of our meals ourselves with a private chef that we have that's local.

We have a yoga studio.

So it just has so much that rain or shine, we can operate because we have indoor and outdoor spaces, we can be there any time of the year.

And we kind of are doing it seasonally right now in the winter and the summer.

So one where it's snowy and cozy and really wintering in and then one where it's more wonder and curiosity and play.

Yeah.

And responding to the sunshine and that kind of openness that comes at that time of year.

So.

And so currently in the us Would you do one in Norway?

Is there going to be a European one happening anytime soon?

I would like to do something European at one point.

I get people asking me that a lot.

I think most of our base right now is American.

So I don't know, I'd have to kind of like check in.

But I.

Well, I know there's a lot of Europeans too, part of the community.

So I don't know, maybe like for the Norwegians, I don't know if they would go for it because a lot of them already live in this way.

A lot of them.

Like the work life balance here is like unmatched.

8 To 4.

The doors of the office are, are locked up at 5.

Like everyone is out by like 3:45 every day.

Like it's just a very different.

You get almost a year paid maternity leave, Paternity leave is a thing here.

Five months off.

I mean, I know the UK also has some, some similarities of that.

Yeah.

But you know, for the US that's so like far that's such a luxury.

So I don't know, but I don't wanna say no.

I would love to do some European ones, but it's just again, finding that right space takes.

Takes.

Yeah, yeah, it does.

But I think that that's also wonderful.

Again, I'm just sort of reflecting on kind of the course of your career and your journey.

So even now you're bringing some of that Scandinavian.

I don't even want to say work life balance, but that, that much more kind of in tune with the rhythms of what people and families need.

Plus nature.

And you're taking that over to the US and to the women who.

And the families who really, really hunger for it.

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Even my kids.

The Barnahaga is what they call it here.

It's like pre kindergarten.

It's very forest school, Montessori, child led based.

Like our program at the retreat is like very similar.

It's very inspired by what my kids are doing every day.

Wonderful.

Will you be staying in Norway or would you head back to the US or.

Watch this space.

This is the this is the plan is to stay in Norway and, and have some global living too.

Like, my sister is in France.

She's married to a Moroccan and they're lovely.

Okay.

So she's local.

Okay, local, yeah.

And she has a Moroccan husband, so she's kind of doing a similar thing with a multicultural family.

So I would love to do some longer stays with my kids around the world, different locations, and really get them immersed, but without having to relocate and move.

Like we originally were thinking we're gonna bring the kids and just relocate and move every couple.

Now we're like, we want them to have roots here.

We love the educational system here.

We think it's good for them, the community here.

Yeah.

But they can still be exposed to everything else a couple months out of the year.

Yeah, I think, I think the community aspect, the rootedness is actually quite important for the children as well.

So.

Yeah.

Monica, where can people find you?

Where can people.

Cause you, obviously you have the podcast, you've got these lovely retreats that happen.

Where can people find out more about you?

Yeah, I mean, the best place is to go to our website, wanderwildfamilyretreats.com and there you'll find out more about the mom and child retreats that we have seasonally in New York, but we also do private retreats and we do family travel planning and that is worldwide.

Like, I had experience traveling so many different places.

I've also connected with so many amazing places over the years.

So we are able to do that.

If you have a multi generational family or a friend group that wants to get together to have a private retreat, or just a smaller family group that wants to do a family wellness travel type experience that will create an itinerary for you so you can find out all about that.

And if you go to the website, you'll find my podcast there too.

If you just want to listen in, I talk about family travel and just like living in a way where you are finding adventure and wonderment and fulfillment in the everyday life.

Yeah.

Yep.

And I think also beautiful.

I love collecting these stories of women who have kind of listened, listened to their heart and done a pivot taken, you know, gone.

I don't know where I'm going, but I'm going to do my best to be brave and courageous and let's just see where this goes.

And stepping off, stepping off the conveyor belt, so to speak, to see what happens.

I just.

These stories I just find so, so inspiring and deeply interesting.

So, Monica, thank you, thank you for your time.

Thank you for sharing this.

And yep, speaking of sharing, for all the listeners, like share, subscribe, send it on to another mum, all the things.

But bless you until the next next episode.

Monica, thank you.

Thank you for having me.

Zoe.