"There's an Australia Bush"

Jamie Jo wrote a fun post recently about the kids of a missionary on furlough.


It reminds me of when we were on Home Assignment last and our 4 y.o. son was known as "the boy from Japan" in his class. We got some strange looks from parents who wondered what "boy from Japan" has blue eyes and blond hair. After six months we finally ended up at a birthday party and had some revealing conversations with some parents. They'd thought their kids were "telling some big ones" and were embarrassed to ask the real truth. Once they understood that we'd been living in Japan but were truly Australians, they were much relieved and we had some laughs. Then we realised why people had seemed unfriendly, they just didn't know what to ask us!


I also remember when we were home for holidays five years ago and we announced that we were going to show the boys some "Australian bush". Our plan was to go out to a local national park and do a little bit of hiking. After that our middle son, who was about five at the time kept pointing out "bushes" saying: "There's an Australia bush."


There truly are some fun times with missionary kids and their perception of life!

Jesus a girl?

Bedtime with our 4 y.o. and 7 y.o. last night:

4 y.o.: Mummy, why was Jesus a boy...(pause) and not a girl?
7 y.o.: Oh, that IS a hard question!

I didn't have to say a word. Praise God for discerning older brothers!

Homesick for Japan?

The first boy I saw this morning rolled into bed with me and moaned into my ear, "I want to go home...back to Japan."

Now he IS still recovering from gastro and has a sore stomach and a depressed head that hasn't had enough to do this week, but it is also true that he longs for 'home in Japan'. This week as we considered the 49 photos of the inside of the house being offered to us, he was peering over our shoulder. The house's architecture looks a lot like the house we've spent the last four years of his life in (like this photo of our previous house's lounge room). It looks like 'home' to him.

Our youngest was moaning yesterday, "I want to play with those toys we packed away in Japan."

Our eldest moaned, "I don't want to do this class talk." Yet he chose the topic Japan. When I asked him the main point he wanted to get across he said, "That Japanese need missionaries." (He's been listening to a lot of missionary talks along that line recently!) He had so much that he wanted to say on Japan, that the five minute limit seemed impossible.

Yes, our boys are not totally Australian. They are TCKs Third Culture Kids (see this post for a definition). Here is a blog post by a missionary family who are American, but have also brought their three boys up in Japan. It highlights how these kids live in both worlds, but are not totally comfortable in either.

It is a challenge for parents to help them stay emotionally balanced. The tendency is for them to consider the place where they are not living to be superior to where they are living. Contentment with the present is something we need to cultivate in order to keep our joy.

3 year old's comments

Kids do say great things, pity we're mostly too busy to write them down for later, but here are a couple from this week: 6 yo ruffles the hair of our 3 yo who cries out, "Mum, he's messed up my hair." Trouble is that his hair is about 1 inch long all over! During the to-bed-routine one night I insisted our 3 yo lay back down on his bed after putting a tissue in the bin. He whined, "But I'm too tired." I told him, "That's the worst excuse I've ever heard for not going to bed." But the irony was lost on him.