The Next 6 Months will be Interesting

I guess it’s time to update everyone on our living arrangements, meaning where we’ll be living and when. Our current plan is to leave Taiwan in the middle of December to travel home for the holidays. We will stop in Arizona to visit family there before heading home to Austin for Christmas and New Years. I will stay in Austin with the girls and Anthony will travel back to Taiwan for work. He’ll come back to Austin in February, hopefully for the birth of the baby. Then a week or so after the baby is born, he’ll head back to Asia. We aren’t sure yet if that means Taiwan or to the new city we are being assigned to – BEIJING! Then, sometime in April, depending on when the new baby is at least 6 weeks old, Anthony will come back to Austin and pick us all up and we’ll all fly to Beijing where we will live for at least one year. Pretty exciting, yet, nerve wracking at the same time. I am sad to leave Taiwan, as I’ve made some good friends here, but we always knew we wouldn’t be here for long, such is the life of an expat. I am excited to be coming home for a few months, even if that means living life with 3 kids and no husband around! It will be a hard and trying time for all of us, I’m sure. We’re working on whether to put the girls in school for a few months while home or to hire someone to come to the house to help out. Maybe both, we’ll just have to see how that plays out.

I realized this last weekend that Ashley will be starting kindergarten in the fall, so we have a new dimension to our relocating that we haven’t had to worry about before – making sure there is a good school nearby where we live that Ashley can attend in Beijing. The one that I know of in Beijing is the International School of Beijing, which is not anywhere near where Anthony works. So, it will be interesting finding housing there. I can’t believe that Ashley is almost old enough for real school! How time flies.

We are keeping an eye on the bird flu situation. I am not concerned right now, here in Taiwan, as health officials tend to be on top of things and let the public know quickly about outbreaks, as well as all the embassies here. There has been no human to human contact that is known from the virus and we don’t hang out around any chickens, birds or ducks, or in the live markets, so we’re fine. I am keeping an eye on China though – heard a report today about hundreds more birds they found contaminated, but still no human to human contact. During SARS, China tried to hide how many people were infected and limit the amount of press that was released about it. I am really hoping that does not happen this time!