Every first of September, I get a Facebook reminder of the trip The Husband and I took to Sydney three years ago: the exploratory venture across hemispheres and time zones to find out if this could be our new home. (Spoiler alert: it could.) I see the post about wearing my power blazer to a school interview I would leave crying because of their dismissal of The Kid based on labels only; I see the photo of the Opera House taken during my run through the botanical gardens; and I feel the excitement and trepidation that accompanied me on the plane here and back, through the halls of that school, on that run. I think of how full I felt my life already was then, before I met any of the people who now populate it, back when the idea of Little Brother and The Kid turning five and eight here felt eons away and is now happening, like, tomorrow.

We’ve gone through three houses and nearly three years here, and we are in the same place we were when we got off the plane yet somewhere totally different.

We are planning five- and eight-year-old birthday parties–on beaches and in parks, Spider-Man and Hot Wheels ventures–and going through lists of friends to invite, names we had never heard three years ago.

We are going out to Mother’s and Father’s Day lunches to the same restaurant, the tourist trap that we love because everything is filled with cheese and our bogan (redneck) asses are HERE FOR IT, a place whose menu has an entire section of fried desserts and where I see a bottle of Moet being delivered to a table and wonder if that’s like ordering a salad at Macca’s (McDonald’s); where TH gets a free beer on his special day and the waitress delivers it while “Thong Song” plays in the background, to be replaced by “Push It,” and we waddle to the car by way of the beach.

We are driving home at 7 am Monday mornings from a weekly hike with my Coastrek team, relishing the BBC News update that covers the entire world, not just the corner I live in, because now the world is bigger than it ever was, as so often happens when one leaves that corner.

We are venturing through the part of the library that has books on North Korea and borrowing both of those books because TK is currently obsessed with a country whose dictator sets the rules, as it falls into his fascination with good and bad governments. We are trying to convince Little Brother that, while an Alexander Hamilton party would be fun for him, he might also want to read the room and go with a more widely-known character.

We are renewing our own obsession with the Tudors and reading historical fiction and finding, on a venture into Kirribilli for a women’s group that feels just right, that their local theatre I’ve been wanting to visit is performing a play about Henry and his last wife, which dovetails perfectly with the book I’m currently reading, and I book tickets to go with a friend who loves most of the same things I do.

We are going on bush walks (that’s what she said) against protests by TK and while TH enjoys his Father’s Day couch-nap and coming to find that we love them, even though LB tests my anxiety with his climbing and TK tests my nerves with his (maternally-modeled) worry over each tricky step.

We are finding a slip of paper in the book I keep filled with the boys’ quotes, a paper that has a list of Fears about Moving that I wrote and prayed through three years ago, and I scan down the list to see how each fear has been lovingly dealt with by grace: therapy network for TK (now answered by a team of people who know and love him), my mental health (dealt with by medication, meditation, and brutal honesty with myself and others), our marriage (that resentment I feared I’d feel after being dragged across the world? nonexistent), water safety (two fish with three pools to their credit), making friends (they now feel like family–just yesterday a note was left on my car that featured a drawing of a penis–insert heart emoji), TK regression (ha)…the list goes on, and is exhaustive and completely ANSWERED.

We are going on daytime beach walks through the sand while the kids are at school, feeling the sun growing stronger here as it wanes on the other side of the world, things different yet similar because both are somehow home. And we–I–walk as far as I can one way then turn around, making footprints then seeing the same ones leading me back to where we began.