You know it's the Olympics when you're late for dinner because watching the gold medal round of Men's Archery is more important.

You know it's the Olympics when you stand shivering in the cold at 11:30 at night watching bikini clad women play beach volleyball in the shadow of 10 Downing Street.

Since there are no sandy beaches nearby, the Olympic Committee shipped in tons of sand and dumped them in a parking lot behind the home of the Prime Minister where we wrapped ourselves in American flags and screamed for Misty May to bring home the gold.

The location for the beach volleyball is the equivalent of playing on the South Lawn of the White House.

In the shadows of the evening we could see people walking on the roof of the Prime Minister's house. This didn't seem odd to us, we'd watched for years as the White House was defended from above. However, the announcer of the beach volleyball game asked all of us to wave at the man on the roof, because instead of carrying a gun he held a brush. He was commissioned by the Mayor of London to paint the scene of the different venues and tonight it was us.

There is an electronic sign in Trafalgar Square counting down the days until the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games in London. Today, with the sun shining down, there are 137 more to go. The countdown is a build up for the city, but for me it represents time running out, as it coincides with our planned departure from our year abroad.

In late summer 2011 our house was a boiling cauldron of overflowing angst about what London might bring. The night before leaving I video-taped the children and uniformly they were scared about one thing: The first day of school. My wife wondered aloud what she would do once I left for work in the morning. I was nervous for them since I felt the burden of dragging them along on this adventure.

And now six months later the kids can’t remember what the first day of school was like. And my wife is out of the house before I am most mornings. So I’m guessing her running/hiking/ art history/photography/museum tour/pub crawling groups fill out her days.

And so with everyone settled into a routine of friends, teams, birthday parties and sleep-overs the question arises, why leave? We went through the trouble of immigration and Visas and schools and housing and then immersion, all for one year? Like most things in life it’s about expectations. If you expect to stay one year it’s hard to get your mind wrapped around two. If you expect to go home in 12 months you plan a certain way: Your expenses, your family, your career, your pets.

But if your life is subjectively better with less stress, less driving, fewer headaches, more freedom, more family time (cuts both ways), less criticism, more days of pure adventure and enjoyment, why end it?

The argument goes that if you are here for a year, it’s like a long vacation, but if you stay it becomes home, with stresses like anything else. If you miss one year of school you can pop back in. If you miss two years, you come back out of sync with the rest of your friends. If you miss the first year of high school it’s an entry point making re-entry tougher.

We took a big risk coming here and it worked. Are we taking as big a risk in year two?

All the negatives for staying relate to what might happen to the children should they be out of their lives for more than the allotted year. For the parents the negatives are softer. There are friends and family that are missed. And we’ve seen the struggle when there is a crisis back home. But the day to day is richer and in many ways more fulfilling. And that’s hard to walk away from.

As Chekov wrote: “Any idiot can face a crisis. It’s the day to day living that wears you out.”