Is there anybody still out there?

So, it’s been, uh, 5 years since my last post. Oops! A few things have happened since then and I clearly neglected to post about any of them. Actually, I did write several blog posts in my head. Sorry you didn’t get to read them.

Today, having thought about it for a good few weeks, I attempted to log back into our blog account. Imagine my surprise when it worked! And, lo, here’s another surprise, I’m writing to you from Vietnam!

Say what??

To catch you up quickly: We ended up living in Thailand for 5 years. The first 6 months were really tough, severe homesickness all around, along with the extreme adjustments that come with being an expat and the accompanying emotional highs and lows. But gradually we grew to love many many things about life in Thailand. We met incredible people, many of whom who became beloved friends. We traveled to amazing places, both within Thailand and several surrounding countries. I started working at the school too and loved being on campus with all of my boys. Eventually, we managed to pay off all our debt! Life was really good. Then, of course, COVID.

While teaching and learning did move online for awhile, Thailand fared better than many countries around the world. But we weren’t able to travel back to the States in the summer of 2020. As we only get home once a year, that meant we wouldn’t be able to see our families for two years. That was incredibly hard, but we knew we weren’t the only ones—people all over the world couldn’t visit their families because of lockdowns or travel restrictions. We also took solace in the fact that there were far worse places to be “stuck.”

We may well have stayed in Thailand longer, but we also knew that if we didn’t move then, we could have ended up staying another 5 years because we didn’t want to move Duncan in his last years of high school. (Yes, he’s now in 10th grade. And Tobin is in 8th grade.) Crazy, right?

But that same summer brought some unexpected administrative shake-ups at our school. (The decisions were blamed on COVID, but we knew there were other motives as well.) The resulting changes led us to see that it was indeed time for our family to move on.

So Kevin once again threw his resume into the international school search pool. We looked both at home and overseas, and after being offered two positions that he ultimately turned down, Saigon South International School became the next right step in our great adventure.

That happened in early 2021. We’d already had a tough beginning to the year (more on that later), but then the year . . . devolved. As if planning the logistics of an international move (during a pandemic) and saying goodbye to cherished friends wasn’t hard enough, this past year featured a bizarre series of events. I’ll save that saga for the next post. And, ultimately, it has led us to where we are now.

I hope you stick around for the next installments as the Brodeurs once again “reset the pins.”

Meanwhile, here’s a video of us, 1 day post-quarantine, reuniting with our beloved Tetley who we hadn’t seen in 4 incredibly long months.