One boy thinking about home assignment

I found one of our younger two boys making this table the other day. He's processing what home assignment this year means in his life. I asked his permission to share and he asked me to block out the items he'd listed.

It is, actually, not too different to how we decided if going on home assignment in July for six months was going to work for our family. Following on from my post yesterday about making it up as we go, this is part of it: weighing up the pros and cons of any decision according to the information you have. The key difference, I think, to parenting in your home country is that you often have a lot less information to work with and a lot more unknown variables.

What's interesting about this list that you can't see is that some items appear on both the pros and cons list, for example "food". Yep, there are things about both Japan and Australia that my boys enjoy and food is one. But when we're in one country they do miss the other!