I love this post. Encapsulates how my wife and I feel about things. We’d both entered the DV Lottery approximately 15 times before we were successful. In this time we have obtained university degrees together, gotten jobs, married, had three children, studied more, changed careers, bought a house, sold a house, flew to New York as a starting point for a family “gap” year, and stayed there for almost 12 month on tourist Visas. Fifteen years later, and at the end of our time in the U.S we were finally successful in the DV Lottery. Now we’re back in Aus and preparing to make the move permanently. Our friends tell us we’re brave, but behind our backs tell each other that we’re insane. Our parents, migrants themselves, can’t understand why we’d leave “the weather” for brutal New York Winters. We know it’s not going to be easy, we still feel constantly overwhelmed, as we have been for the last six months. We’re not sitting on a financial goldmine, we’re saving hard for this move. We have three children and they’re all used to an easy-going middle-class Aussie lifestyle. We’ll need to be prepared, we’ll all have to hustle. However, if didn’t take this chance we know that in the future, the pain of regret will outweigh the sacrifices our whole family are making now.
