Moving to Melbourne and the last day of school!

On the last day of school the kids have Christmas mufti day. Mufti means you don't have to wear your school uniform. Here are the girls with their friends!

Olivia in her Christmas attire 

Mary with her BEST friend Georgie!

 Olivia and her Year 2 crush....Gabriel 

 Olivia and her good friends! (Olivia, Indiana, Olivia & Aiofe)

 BFF Indiana (who moved to the USA) and came back for the last day of school

Mary and her Kindy crush Jamison

 Mary and her good friend Tea

Thomas and Archie (have been together since 8 months)

    and then me and my mum friends from the past 3 years

In addition to winding things up on the last day of school, Stan and his work finally finished negotiations and settled on an agreement to move our family down to Melbourne so we can be with Stan this next year. Stan is consulting a company based in Melbourne and has been flying down (8 hours south) every week, for 2 years....home  on the weekends! Stan would be working in Melbourne for at least another year or two so we approached the company about moving down, so long as they helped with the move since it was work related. 

Overall it as a huge win:win. The company no longer has to pay to fly Stan down and back every week, put him up  in a hotel, and give him a food allowance. From our side, we get to see Stan, and save some money as well (free rent, utilities, no moving costs and best of all free public schools!) The timing is unbelievable as the Australian government has just moved to stop all tax cuts to non-resident working in Australia come July. With Bain picking up our move and living expenses for this work transfer, we can apply for residency during this hot political time and if approved we will be treated and taxed like regular Australians by the time our work transfer is up. In addition, we should be able to save quite a bit of money for a house if we choose to stay in Australia or go back to America. 

The perks will only be for a short time but the timing is a miracle, given the surrounding political circumstances and the fact that our visa's are about to expire (Oct)....seriously there are so many compounding variables that I can't even remember them all, but our other ex-pat friends are having to have hard conversations about being financially forced to move back to America (still in recession) or to try to stick it out in Australia during all this political turmoil. Because of the project Stan has been assigned in Melbourne, we end up way better...which I never would have seen 2 years ago when he first started traveling. I am so glad we never asked to get off the case!

Good by Sydney and Hello Melbourne!