Original subtitles

Let's go.

When you have kids, you just want to imagine everything's going to be okay.

For us, we can't hide in that perfect future.

You know when you have kids, you're trying to control things,

so one is possible, two,

yeah, you can get control when you have two kids, three is really stressful.

When you get to four kids, you accept chaos.

Let's go.

Mia was the first born.

She's an A-type where it's like, you follow me.

Oh, my God.

Leo is totally different from Mia, you can't have more different.

He has a lot of imagination.

Sometimes I wish I could be in his head because it looks so fabulous all the time.

Colin, how can I describe him? He's...

Weird kid.

And Laurent.

Laurent is our little philosopher.

Life with four kids is never quiet, so it's chaos.

There's tantrum, there's like, a meal to prepare, there's homework.

We're just completely overwhelmed,

so it seems like life is just escaping you.

You see each other every day but there's not much time to connect.

But after the diagnosis, everything changed.

Our kids were pretty young when we learned that

three out of four have retinitis pigmentosa.

So we have Mia, Colin,

and Laurent.

Leo is the only one that didn't get the disease.

Retinitis pigmentosa is a genetic disease.

Basically, the cells in my kids' retina are dying little by little.

Blindness is a spectrum, and everyone experiences it differently.

But, with the condition my kids have,

if your field of vision is like that for a normal person,

slowly it's going to be shrinking

and shrinking until there's really only the center that remains.

You have this diagnosis,

but what goes with it is that we can't do anything about it.

So, not only you're numb, you're powerless.

It's just too much.

We walked out of the doctor's office and,

we didn't really talk about it.

I had dreams and an idea of what my life

and my family is going to be in the future,

and all of a sudden, the rest of our story is a blank page.

Like stepping in the unknown.

No? -No.

For me, the hardest part with the diagnosis was the inaction,

'cause there's nothing they can do about it.

There's not treatment, there's nothing.

You know, if there's anything that I could do like,

I don't know, a special diet, exercise or,

like I needed to get into action to feel that I'm getting control over that.

So, I met with a specialist and she said,

the best thing you can do right now is to fill their visual memory.

She was saying you can open an encyclopedia

and look at pictures of elephants and giraffes,

so, when they do go blind, they at least have an image of what it looks like.

That was something really concrete that I can do.

There's nothing compared to the real thing.

So, I said to Seb, let's go see giraffes and elephants.

Travelling the world is always something that had been on our minds.

and, we just put the two together and said,

okay, then, let's do it. Let's do it now.

Let's go all in and fill their visual memory

with as much beautiful thing as we can.

When you ask a six-year-old which country do you want to visit,

they have no clue.

So we asked them, is you can do any activity anywhere in the world,

what you want to do.

That's the famous bucket list.

The backbone of our trip.

Bye! -Bye!

You know the first one,

I think that was unanimous.

All the kids really wanted to do a safari,

so see the lions, elephants and giraffes.

So he really wanted to sleep in a train.

Obviously.

That was Mia's dream.

Leo wanted to learn how to surf.

Laurent, at some point said, I want to drink juice on a camel.

Like, really, why?

Watch a desert sunset.

See a sunrise on a mountain.

Make friends in other countries.

A Canadian couple is taking their kids

a year-long tour of the world for a special reason.

You are travelling and you are homeschooling four kids,

I can't even imagine, where are you guys off to next?

Thinking about this family dealing with this,

I think we all should seize the day.

Let's go! Let's go!

Once we had decided on our trip,

the next step was, how are we going to pay for that?

It was possible but, we would put all our resources in there.

Do we have to rent the house, do we have to sell the cars?

But, not long before we left for the trip,

the company Sebastien was working for got sold

and he had shares in that company.

They gave us a financial flexibity to say, we can do this,

you know, within our 200 dollar per day budget.

And that's where I came up with, well, we're going to go camping,

we're going to go in youth hostels, we're going to stay close to the people,

we're going to stay in these homestays.

No. No.

No. Oh, my God. Oh, my God.

So tomorrow it's the night cruise.

My kids, three of my kids don't see in the dark at all, not at all.

But maybe we can do the first one and then decide

which one of the two we want to do.

Right now, it's only their night vision that's gone.

So that means that, when there's less light,

they lose vision a lot quicker, where you don't see in the dark.

Okay, okay, okay.

For some people, going on a backpacking trip with four kids

is just an insane thing to do.

but, the only way to find out is to try it.

That's one of my items,

I really wanted to go hiking several days in the mountains.

We were not sure if it was a little crazy to do that.

But, where better than the Himalayas to push the limits?

So, now we're in... -Now we're in Genou. -Yeah.

We're hiking nine days to the Poon Hill lookout.

Which is 3,300 metres above sea level.

We'll celebrate Leo's birthday at the top.

In the Himalaya, I took so many pictures it's insane.

With very little central vision you can still see pictures.

So for me it was a way to take that grandness

and put it in a little picture,

for them to be able to see later.

Let's go.

You know, you see all the pictures and you imagine your kids,

you know, the sun rising, but you forget the part that

they're tired, cranky, it's cold, and they need to hike that mountain.

Sometime, you know, it's not as magical as you imagine it can be.

I knew Laurent knew he was going blind,

what I didn't realise is that he didn't know what it meant to be blind.

So, we were on the road,

and all of a sudden he turns around, mommy, what does it mean to be blind?

And, like that question was just like,

an arrow through my heart, like I stopped breathing.

He was only five, So, I just answered simply,

it's just like if your eyes are always closed.

But that moment,

I just felt that I somehow ended his innocence.

Let's go.

Let's go.

I don't know anybody who's blind,

like in my family, around me, I don't know anything about blindness.

The first thing I did when I got out of the doctor's office

it was go onto the internet and read as many research paper as I could.

But, that didn't help me much.

I was angry, I was like, why does this happen to us?

You need just a lot of time for yourself to process it,

and to go through the anger and the sadness.

Maybe.

I remember the first time I realised that she couldn't see stars.

Those are the first things that

you know they'll never be able to see and there's no going back.

That's the first things you need to say goodbye to.

You know, it's going to be like that with so many things in the future.

Wow.

Okay?

Oh, my God. -Hello!

Take care, take care, please.

Take care.

I never seen her like that.

That moment for her was a reminder of what's coming.

Yeah, Gustavo seems to be, like,

has as much energy as Leo. Like a lot of energy.

Actually, I remember mine.

Um, it was Leo, my second son.

And his face caught on fire and he got badly burned by the fire.

In the dream I wasn't panicking but, still,

that dream like, stayed with me.

Because I knew it meant something,

and I feel it's not something good, but I can't figure out what it means.

Let's, let's go guys. Please, let's go.

Have a good day.

When we did that trip,

we were so focused on filliing their visual memory,

we didn't see how wonderful it would be

to watch them grow and discover the world.

It was an amazing gift.

But, they grow up.

And little by little they'll have their own life.

Their own world outside of the family.

That's the hardest thing about being a parent is letting go.

And that's what you do all their life.

Bye! -Bye!