Home for the holidays

Someone was asking, " How do the Chinese celebrate their New Year?"

Well, apart from letting off lots of fireworks, everyone tries to go home for the New Year.

We are going to do that too. Home to Oz for two weeks. We will arrive in Perth on January 26th - which is our special National Day, "Australia Day". There will be fireworks, thousands will flock to Perth and have a picnic on the Swan River foreshore to see the big display.

We will visit our house, our family home, in Rockingham, south of Perth. Even though it's a five bedroom house, it has always been full of people. We built it when our kids were small, and they grew up there. It has a lovely big kitchen where there was always plenty of food and good fellowship. We rarely had to wonder where our teenagers were - they were mostly at our place along with their friends. I would cook bucket-loads of food, and in no time the fridge would be empty again. It seemed everyone had "fridge rights" at our house.

And then our son and his wife and kids lived there too, and we came to China.

But now it's empty. The kids have all moved on and so have we.

So it's time to go say goodbye to our house. But also to visit our kids in their homes and to impose ourselves on them for a bit ...