The last time I posted, in March 2022, we were wrapping up our time in Ankara, Turkey and preparing to move back to the US. We spent 3 years in the US. I don’t tend to blog during US years because it’s fairly daily life and there are many, many blogs already about things to do with kids in the US. In September 2025, we moved to Hanoi, Vietnam where we will live for 3 years.

I have been homeschooling both kids and the blog wasn’t a priority. However, we have done some great sightseeing and traveling and I want to slowly work on those back posts and continue to blog going forward! DD is now 13 and finishing 7th grade and DS is 10 and finishing 4th grade.

We live in Tay Ho, a popular expat neighborhood with a mix of local and foreign shops and cuisines. It includes more cafes per block than any other city I’ve lived in and is a chaotic and pleasing mix of new and old. Tay Ho wraps around a large lake. Tay Ho means West Lake and the lake is called Ho Tay, or Lake West. (As an aside, for ease and speed of typing, I won’t normally use diacritics or marks on any of the vowels unless the post is specific to Vietnamese.)

Some trips we have taken that I’ll blog about over the months–Cat Ba Island by Ha Long Bay, Ninh Binh (twice!), Singapore, Tam Dao, Sapa, Ba Vi, and Da Nang. We’ve also done a lot of sightseeing around Hanoi.