new year, new things

Happy New Year and happy new internet connection!....What a year already! I got a job, quickly, and I am very happy despite the shambles arrangement called 'childcare' which parents are subjected to.....ugh....but look above...our beautiful Long Long arrived safe and sound from Tokyo and almost finished his prison term...ahem..I mean quarantine....I am so looking forward to having him home and showing him his new digs. I have prepared some very comfy mats for him in the various sunny locations inside (in an attempt to get him not to sleep in our makeshift beds on the floor)...pure heaven for a whippet. We can visit him and he is well cared for but it will be nice to have him home for good....
and this little guy...what a great job he has done being uprooted twice now and done such a good job to hang in there, always with a smile and a cuddle and sometime a smashing but its pretty normal for a 3 year old I guess. I think the biggest change for me this year will be letting him grow up a bit by going to daycare more often, well, a lot....and us not spending anywhere near as much time together.. its natural for a parent to do this and almost everyone I know has been through it but now its my turn. Lucky I am excited about going to work because it helps keep me motivated and positive. Finding the 'right' care is the hard bit......someone described the whole thing like removing a band aid, do it quickly and get it over with, then it becomes easier....good advice I think....living it will be the challenge.

Life back in Australia is incredible, really, this is a beautiful place to live, Melbourne, so open, so sparsely populated, so pretty and clean and reasonably safe, so many, many places to play or sit and think and have a coffee, such a beautiful place to raise children, so external. My appreciation for this place would be nowhere near as thorough and wholehearted had I not lived a Tokyo life for a few years. Tokyo is wonderful, but in different, more internal ways, so I am lucky to have the chance to live both. For the meantime, here and now, with lovely friends, family and my sweet partner, mooch and pointy nosed pooch, I could not be happier.