One of the reasons we moved to the US is that we wanted Aila to experience living in a new country, to understand that it is possible to live in more than one place.  The hope being that she will have the mindset to want to experience new cultures and have new experiences in her life, when the time comes, of course all that being said I fully expect that she’ll now want to stay in Barrington for the rest of her life…

As with the nature of anything, as soon as you begin to settle down in a new house, make new friends then along comes change, nothing is constant, no matter how much you wish otherwise. For Aila this has been a painful lesson for the past week or so, two years ago we had the pleasure to meet Si, Nicki and their two beautiful daughters, its not all been plain sailing, relationships between  females never are but Arya and Aila have become the best of friends, so when Si announced they were moving to DC there were some tears but the two girls purely concentrated on making the best of the situation and effectively spending almost every second of time they could together. There were times when Laura and I wondered if that was the best approach, should we try to wean the girls off each other, instead we decided to stick with it and cope with the aftermath.

Eventually the ‘dreaded’ day arrived and the family left for DC, suffice to say AIla was devastated with a very teary couple of days, to this day there are still moments when she will sit reflecting and state “I miss Arya”. Fortunately with todays technology they have been able to stay in touch on FaceTime and were hopeful that we’ll get the chance to visit in DC, a city I have wanted to visit ever since the mid 80’s when I began to develop an interest in the states.

More importantly as we learnt only too well, when leaving the UK, you never lose friends you only gain new ones. Of course that’s easier to type and understand as a man in his early forties than it is when your 7.

I first typed the above just a little over a month ago, of course as seems to be the inevitable when I had just started writing I was called away and struggled to get back to this. There are still days when Aila mentions Arya and we now have new neighbour’s who fortunately for us are helping me prove my statement above, you really do only gain new friends.