Month Four Report

We enjoyed April. For one thing, we spent about a third of the month on vacation in New Zealand. My many gushing blog posts speak for themselves on that account. Coming back from vacation I was struck once again by what a great life we live here in Australia. Sure, we get caught up in the day to day. We go to school and work, we do dishes and laundry and grocery shopping. We find ourselves considering this an ordinary life.

But then I go for a run and find myself here at the end of the Balmain peninsula peering over the harbor to downtown.

And out our window the air smells sweet from jasmine bushes like this.

The warm weather and ample sun have had good effects on all of us. We walk a ton. The girls play outside for hours every day and they have grown stronger and braver for it. 

Here and there I hear bits of an Aussie accent sneaking into Emily and Tess's speech. We talk a lot about accents these days. We talk about how it feels to be different. Emily's teacher taught them the "You say tomato, I say tomato" song and makes reference to it frequently. 

We talk to the kids about how we drive on the other side of the road here - not the wrong side. One side is correct here, another is correct where we come from. It's not that the United States and Australia are the best countries ever - it's that they are the countries we love and other people love their countries, too.  There are places you are born into and places you adopt. I hope these lessons will stick them when we get home. 

Speaking of home, four months also marks our halfway point but I'm kind of in denial about that.