Once in a life time - it might not be enough

This is a post I honestly never thought I would write.

And it's been sat in my drafts for quite a while now.

So I'll jump straight in.
We turned down the opportunity of a life time. A once in life time kind of thing, that we are unlikely even to get close to again. And I'm going to share it with you (be warned, this is going to be a long'un!).

I won't go into too much detail on our private life, but suffice to say, Dann is very good at his job (he works in management within highways construction) and one thing led to another and he was offered work in Australia.

Yep Australia. The land down under. On the other side of the world. Where it's sunny, and they have beaches and koala bears.

And we declined.

Now you may well be thinking one of two things. Either we're completely raving mad, or the offer wasn't that great.

It was a pretty great offer. More money. Family flights. Dann's VISA. Guaranteed work for a minimum of two years.
And we were really really tempted. We had lengthy discussions on the logisitics of moving. Whether it was even feasible as we own our house, and car. And then we had to think about the cat. What I'd do out there. Where in Australia? What would our family say? And our friends? Could I rebrand my blog? How would we sell off all our stuff, and ship the stuff we wanted to keep.

We really did consider it.
And why not. Like I said, it was a once in a lifetime opportunity. I've often dreamt of visiting, but I never even thought about moving there (my dream in my teens was moving to NYC after living in London for a few years), and there it was, waiting for us on a silver platter.
And given how the UK was hit with turmoil when Dann got the offer, it was even harder to make a decision. Manchester had seen the worst terror attack since 7/7 and everything about living in the UK came into question.
Could we protect our baby more from the horrors of the world if we lived on the other side of it? Would we be safer? 
The UK seemed like such a terrible place to be, even with the amazing feats of the NHS, police and general public in the face of terror.

But it didn't seem right to make a decision straight away. So we thought long and hard about it.

Ultimately, as you know, we decided to stay here in the UK.

And here's why.

England is our home. It's comfortable and I've always seen my family's future here, surrounded by our family and friends.
We built our life here. We have our house which we've poured out hearts and souls into. We love being here, and the unpredictability, the uncertainty, and the weather make it so unique.

It may have been a once in a lifetime offer, but we have the best offering of them all, we have our life here. Maybe one day we'll visit the land where we could have set up home, but until then Australia, we want our tea loving home more.

For us, there is no place like home. And no home like England.