Thanks...giving

What am I thankful for?

Kind of off topic, but it gets me to my point, bear with me...someone asked me today "how are you liking being home?". Well, this isn't' an unusual question by any means, but for some reason it really got me thinking. I have my response on what feels like autopilot - "it's great to be home but we do miss Zurich". But that response doesn't really tell the whole story...what I wish I could say is this: it has been a little harder than most people imagine it would be to "come home". Being near our families and having our old friends back has been wonderful. We love Seattle and we love speaking English all the time. And we are very excited to spend the holidays "home" this year. But the hard part about moving home to Washington is that we left a very real home behind us in Switzerland. It is tough to feel such a strong connection to two places at once and to have one of those places be somewhere we may not see for a very long time...It's like someone has died. And it's not only that - we left behind a family there too - friends that we shared Thanksgiving and Christmas and births of babies with. Not only is it Thanksgiving this week (call me sentimental), but yesterday our dear friends Sean and Petra called us just hours after giving birth to their brand new son Nicholas to share the news with us. We miss them, we wish we were there to welcome him to the world!

So anyway, I don't mean to sound sad or negative or any of those things...I just want to remember out loud that what we left behind is very real - three years worth of our own quirky holiday traditions, some of the best friends we'll ever know, a gorgeous city, and the home where we brought our little girl from the hospital. And I think it is ok to say that we will miss those things for a very long time.

So back to the point, what am I thankful for? Well first I am thankful for Andy & Hadley :) But I'm also thankful that we had the chance to spend 3 years becoming a family in a foreign country and I'm so thankful for all of you who touched our lives while we were there. I am thankful that we have two places that we can always call home and I'm thankful that the biggest problem in my life right now is a little case of wanting to be in two places at once!

SO -- Happy Thanksgiving to everyone here and in Zurich! And congratulations Sean & Petra on the birth of Nicholas! We are so excited to meet him (one day very soon, we promise).