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| The View Still Amazes Us |
I guess that’s just what happens when life gets in the way
and priorities shift – as in when you start a new relationship, new job or when
a newborn shows up on your door step.
When we last left you our honeymoon period was ‘maturing’
into a level of contentment that I don’t feel that I have ever achieved in
Toronto. Lennoxville, maybe, but not
Toronto. I don’t know what it is or why
it has taken so long for that feeling to hit me – but it has and I’m going to
hold on to it as long as I can.
Shortly after the last (and only post) our stuff arrived
from a long and arduous journey from Canada.
We had waited soooo long for everything to arrive, very anxious – like a
piece of us was missing since our arrival in late August 2011. But now that it was here, I started getting a
lot of flashbacks.
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| Lily arrives in this world |
Like ghost from the past – I began to remember the first
time Erica and I went to go see the old house on Flagman. The bare bones of the inside, no drywall,
wires exposed and us there envisioning what it could be. From there moving in to the asylum white
paint soaked interior on Halloween; a year later welcoming Lily into the house
and then Jake, changing our lives forever.
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| Jake the ever cheeky one |
I remembered the dinners, the brunches, the birthdays, the
holidays. I remembered selling off everything
we had and packing the rest. I
remembered being the last one in that house – empty, just as we moved in. This house became our home. A place where we began our lives as parents
and our first real tests as adults and as a married couple. Now it was just a house again.
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| Kids flying the kite behind the old house |
Now I sat in our new home, maybe half the size of Flagman,
standing in a sea of boxes not knowing where to begin. I remembered feeling that we have finally
arrived. This was no joke and that we
were now in it for the long haul. For
the last three or four months we have been tourists in this house, but with our
stuff now arrived, it was ready to become our home.
It’s funny how “stuff” makes you feel that way in turning
the unfamiliar to the familiar. Aside
from the dishes and other things that we used on a day-to-day, it was great to
get our bed (so we could stop feeling as if we lived in a flop house), our
couch and our pictures.
In Flagman, it took us a looong time for us to hang one, let
alone ten pictures. Here, in a matter of
minutes we had all of our pictures hanging.
In twenty-four hours – this place went from feeling like a long stay
hotel to our home.
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| Lil's in the new backyard |
Now a year in, and even though we are paying more for less –
this house has felt more like a home than our old one felt. We are more comfortable in it, we enjoy it
more even though we actually spend less time there. I think this is very telling on how our mindset
has evolved in these past twelve months.
Maybe it was the fact that we never really liked our Flagman house? Maybe
we just felt shacked to that mortgage, not allowing us the freedom to move
abroad quicker? Maybe it is the
day-to-day attitude that we had adopted that has made us feel more
settled? We really don’t know what it
is. However we now feel like this is
where we need to be and to us that is very settling.
To sum it up, we have no regrets in moving down under and as
we’ve expressed to our friends and family in our recent trip back to Canada –
we’re now going through the process to become permanent residents. Those feelings of being isolated and far away
have melted as we created a great network of friends here and we know that
family is only a Skype or 20 hour flight away.
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