You might have guessed from the silence on here that we have been mid-move again.

Believe it or not, the short move across town has been a lot more challenging than the move across the world was.

In part, that’s because of the physical scale of what we’ve been doing. Rather than walking into a dinky little furnished cottage where we needed to do little more than empty three suitcases into the cupboards, we have been unpacking the contents of a forty-foot container, some of which we only packed up nine weeks ago, but some of which we haven’t seen in over two years. (Hello DorkySon’s old playpen, and random wooden medicine cabinet that I don’t remember ever buying…). We have been trying to fit nearly forty large boxes of books into a house with just one built in bookcase. And for the first time ever, we are in a house with a flight of stairs, which is helping me discover all sorts of new muscles I didn’t even know I had.

But it has also been a more challenging move because, eight weeks in, we have a routine down now and that has had to continue. When we first arrived in Hobart we had the luxury of three weeks together as a family, exploring the city. We woke up when we felt like it, and drank coffee in bed. We allowed ourselves the extravagance of lunches out and takeaway dinners most nights. We spent our spare time writing joyful postcards to friends and family back home.

With this move, DorkyDad has still been getting up and going to work every morning. There has still been swimming lessons, pre-kindy sessions and nursery drop-offs to do with DorkySon. There has been laundry to do, supermarket shopping, lunchboxes to fill, and a million and one other things that make up the jigsaw puzzle of family life, and have had to be slotted in around the business of moving. We are all exhausted.

But – and it is a big but – it all feels so worthwhile. We are in our home now. We have our big old dining table back, which we haven’t had with us since Edinburgh. We have our songs playing on the radio. We have our own beds, with our own sheets, and our own soft rugs underfoot when we get up to wee in the night. DorkySon has been delightedly rediscovering all his toys and books. DorkyDad comes home every night and stalks the house, peering at the walls until he discovers the perfect place to hang another picture or two.

Like any new home, it will require a little bit of work to make it truly ours. Spring is taking its time arriving here, so we have been finding it very chilly and need to work out how to fix that. We have a beautiful deck area, with a pizza oven and a barbecue, but no furniture to sit on yet. And there are all the usual dull things to get – storage boxes, coathooks, bathroom bins and the like.

We have been avoiding those things on the to-do list.

Our main addition to the character of the house so far has been a beautiful freestanding bird sculpture – made of corrugated iron – which we fell in love with one Saturday morning at Salamanca Market. His name is Victor the Brolga, and he stands proud in the corner of our dining room.

Outside of the house, we have been continuing to do all of the things you do in a new city. We have met the neighbours, one of whom is from Glasgow. Ha! We now have a car, which warrants a blog post in itself, sometime soon. We are visiting parks, wandering around markets and tentatively wondering where we might find a babysitter. We are having long conversations with lovely local tradesmen, where we all smile and nod in what we hope are the right places, as we struggle to understand each other’s accents.

Soon, I hope I will get out with my camera and capture some of this. Day after day, right now, I see things that make me smile, things that make me laugh, and things that make me just stop and look and shake my head with a wow. What a cool new place I’m living in. What interesting people I’m surrounded by. What a life, this is.

For now, I’m afraid, you’ll have to take my word for it.