It's been more than a year since we moved from our much-loved neighborhood in Baltimore.   We've taken many opportunities to visit, staying with friends, arriving just in time for this neighborhood event, or that birthday.  It isn't easy, but I've noticed a few things:

• Our daughter still sometimes refers to the our old neighborhood as "our Real place", but is very comfortable also in "our New place".
  
• When we visit friends, several of whom have children the same age (because something was truly in the water that year) who she's known since they were 3 and 4 weeks old, the kids pick up right where they left off - as if they'd never been apart.
  
• She is comfortable meeting new people in the old neighborhood, and loves telling her neighborhood 'aunts' and 'uncles', as well as her godparents and various other friends-who-are-like-family, what she's been up to in the intervening months. 
  
• There is always a place to stay, and we try to rotate so as to avoid overstaying our welcome at any one place.  We also try to be good guests; bringing something with us, cleaning up after ourselves, taking our hosts out to eat or helping to cook.  We are lucky that there are some warm and friendly B&Bs and hotels in the area to balance out the guest-room surfing that we do frequently to keep costs down.
  
• She, and we, know something very important - after a year of finding that our friends haven't forgotten us, and seem to have forgiven us for moving away:  we can go home again. 
  
  

Happy New Year to our friends and family far and wide.  We love to see you, and to visit with you - and will continue to do so in the coming year.