HAO788 | I moved to Moscow with a job offer, a couple of suitcases, and no real plan for what happens when you're also trying to raise a kid three time zones and one language away from everything you grew up knowing. Nobody warns you about the small stuff — the paperwork for a residence permit that somehow always needs one more stamp, the pediatrician visit where you're nodding along without understanding half the room, the first time your toddler comes home saying a Russian word before an English one. This is where I write it all down, mostly for myself, but also for anyone else figuring out fatherhood somewhere far from home.

Parenting abroad has a way of stripping out the noise. Back home you can coast on habit — the same schools, the same playgrounds, the same unspoken rules everyone just knows. In Moscow, almost nothing is automatic. You're learning the metro map and the school system and the winter gear situation all at once, usually while your kid is watching how you handle it. I've made a lot of mistakes here — showed up to a school event a day early, guessed wrong on a doctor's instructions, froze my daughter's cheeks off because I underestimated a February walk. Those are the stories that actually teach you something, so those are the ones I tell.

Most of what's here falls into a few buckets: honest posts about raising kids in a language and culture that isn't originally mine, the practical stuff other expat parents keep asking me about — schools, healthcare, visas, where to find peanut butter that doesn't cost a small fortune — and the quieter reflections on what it means to be a present father when you're also just trying to keep your head above water in a new city. Some posts are useful. Some are just true. I try not to write the kind that are neither.

I'm not a parenting expert, and I'm skeptical of anyone who claims to be one after a handful of years on the job. What I can offer is specificity — real names of clinics, real timelines for paperwork, real accounts of the days that went sideways and the ones that didn't. If you're an expat dad in Moscow, or thinking about becoming one, or just curious what it looks like from the inside, I'd rather give you the unpolished version than a highlight reel. That's usually more useful anyway.

If any of this sounds like your life, or the life you're about to move into, stick around. New posts go up when there's something worth saying — not on a schedule, and not because a content calendar told me to. Feel free to dig through the archive for whatever's relevant to where you're at, whether that's your first week in the city or your fifth winter. And if you've got a question I haven't covered yet, ask — there's a decent chance I've already lived through it, badly, and can save you the trouble.