I have two BIG pieces of news to share….

1. Our little family is moving back to Australia!

2. Our little family is about to get bigger, and busier!

When my husband Jono and I moved to Canada on a whim in 2012, it was meant to be for one year. Little did we know this spontaneous move would change our lives and we’d still be here 8 years later!

• I embarked on an entirely new career path and never looked back. 

• We made friends for life that made Vancouver feel like home, even though we never imagined home being anywhere but Australia… which was now 12,500km away!

• We learnt that happiness had very little to do with the size of the paycheck we took home or the square footage of the house that we lived in. (I earned minimum wage when we arrived in Canada and we lived in a tiny 1-bedroom suite, and life was—and still is—glorious.)

• We started growing our little family with the arrival of Lydia Grace and found strength we never knew we had courtesy of years of infertility and failed rounds of IVF.

• We both became Permanent Residents of Canada, and Jono went on to become a Canadian citizen. 

• And I discovered unimaginable career satisfaction through starting my own business. 

I think we always knew we’d move back to Australia “one day”, but as the years went on we avoided that question like professional dodgem car drivers!

But then…. Opportunity came knocking.

Jono had the chance to open another Australian office of the Canadian company he worked for, and it was to be in the town we always imagined we’d one day return to… Newcastle, NSW which also happens to be driving distance from both of our families.

And I had established a truly international business through The Strategy Studio with clients in Australia, USA, Canada and Europe. My physical location was no barrier to future growth.

So it was decided. We were finally moving back to Australia!

The next month… we found out we were expecting another little member of our family, due to arrive in July, 2020..

Talk about timing!

So what does this all mean and when are we leaving? 

Thankfully, it means very little changes here at The Strategy Studio, other than my time zone! I’ll be continuing with all of my existing clients and services, and reopening my books to new clients from April. 

s for our departure date… It’s February 27… and I’m in COMPLETE denial! It’s taken me over a month to compose this post because I kept bursting into tears from the great sadness at leaving friends and a city we love, but then simultaneously the sheer excitement of returning with Lydia to our family and friends in Australia. And then there’s the realisation we’re able to do this big move while both continuing our careers. And then the gratitude of being able to have a second child. Yep. All the emotions (and hormones) over here!

More to come in the weeks ahead, but for now, thanks for sharing in this exciting news with us.