Time Travel

Bloody hell. I log in and realize I haven't posted in over three years. Three short years in which a lot has happened.

Looking back to where I was when I last posted it is hard to think where my head was at the time. I had moved my children from their home in Colorado to a new life in Canberra, Australia. I was acclimating to a new life living in my homeland, realizing I was like a square peg in a round hole, I just didn't fit very well anymore. I have said to anyone who will listen that for the first year in Australia I suspected I had made a very big, expensive, mistake moving back. But then I began to have friends I enjoyed hanging out with and the kids had found friends at school. Life began to take on a degree of normalcy that allowed us all to enjoy living in Australia.

By early 2012 I heard rumblings that the Aussie government would bring down a very tight budget, opting to balance the budget rather than spend on projects. I began to seriously save my money to offset the chance of having my contract not extended. This turned out to be a wise decision  as I finished at my contract by end of July. Rather than sit and worry about the future I opted to fly back to Colorado the next day to gauge just what the next move should be. B had already told me he thought living in Australia was good for the kids. I wanted to see if our move should be permanent or not.   It didn't take long being back in my home in Colorado to realize that my marriage had ended quite some time ago and that we had just been functioning on auto pilot. I voiced my desire to officially end our marriage and B requested I bring the kids back. Well, I guess that gave me direction.  I had never intended to permanently separate them from their dad, the intention was to give them their two years residency in Australia so that their citizenship there would extend to their own children. A quirk of citizenship by descent is that you can only pass it on if you live in Australia for two years.

For the next few months I tried to find a contract in Canberra to carry me over until the move back to Colorado, which could not occur before the end of the year as the kids needed to finish their school year. Nothing suitable became available and I enjoyed my time as a stay at home mum, walking kiddies to and from school every day, baking cookies (with the help of  thermie of course) and relaxing. I was also looking for a job in Colorado and applied for a position at Progressive Insurance. That was in September and the application process dragged on due to some interesting twists and turns. Ultimately I wanted to leave Canberra before school started for the 2013 school year, February 5th. In fact that was the day we flew out as I received an offer at Progressive in late January. That was also E's birthday, so she was able to have birthday pavlova with her Aussie grandma for breakfast and then have birthday cake with her American grandma for dinner all on the same day.

Within three days of arriving I had the kids enrolled in school. Within a week I was at my new job. Presto chango and we are living in the US like nothing happened. But something did happen, my kids discovered that their mum isn't really all that weird when you get her in her homeland environment, and that there is a possibility of living happily outside of the comfort zone they once had. Two things made returning to the US easier than I expected. 1. Miss Millie travelled ahead of us and was waiting for us at home with her tail wagging, excited to see us. 2. I managed to snag a Thermomix from Canada and it was waiting for me. That is a story in itself and I'll save it for a separate blog.