Just turned down the boys' school places here for next year. It was the hardest bit, emotionally, of this whole process, which is ironic because this whole process wouldn't have started unless we hadn't decided they shouldn't be going to school here. The childhood-ending Gymnasium Godzilla isn't going to is really nice, for a childhood-ending institution. It has a vivarium in the atrium. Nice big one. Recent total rebuild. Looks like well-lit Star Trek. And the Monkey King knows what's going on too, and he's sad about it. The pandemic really fucked up the years we've spent here, but it's still their place, their friends, their sense of everything. What are we doing dragging them out of this sense of place? 

I thought I had accepted it, but I hadn't: parenting is choosing your poison. Not for yourself, because that's just life once you move out of your parents' place. I'm totally comfortable choosing my own poison. It's choosing your poison for other people, for the people you love most in the world, the people who you would literally set the world on fire to protect. But you still have to choose a poison.