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What to write about? There is nothing much going on, but at the same time a lot is going on. Our day to day life is quite normal, even with the fact that Adriaan is travelling a lot and will only be home for 3 days in 3 weeks.

The thing that is going on is the thing that is typically going on in the last year of an assignment: thinking about where we will go next.
Things have gone a bit different than we thought a few months back. We were set to add another two years (from 2015) to our time in India. It took some time to get used to the idea that, instead of being almost at the end, we were suddenly only halfway through our time here. Once used to the idea, we saw all sorts of advantages in staying. The boys are in a great school, with all the support they need. Joshua will move to the Netherlands next summer to start University, so with everything already organised here I would be able to settle him in without having to move house and country with the rest of the family at the same time. Lots of win-win situations.
Unfortunately the reason for signing on for those extra years does no longer exist, the new job that was going to be created has not survived the reorganisation, so all of a sudden we are thrown back into the situation where this is our last year.

Adriaan has been throwing possible new postings at me over the last few weeks and every time I go and search the web to find information about IB schools, health care and living conditions to see if those would be feasible options. Mind you, these are only possibilities he is thinking of, we don't even know if there will be a job for him that would match his aspirations.
Every posting has it's specific challenges, even more so when you have children and even more so when you have children with special needs. I guess it comes natural to every mother to worry about the effect it will have on the child(ren) when you move, so you can probably imagine the worries I have had (and it have only been 'what if we go there MAYBE?' situations so far).

The funny thing is that the possible move that has worried me most so far is moving back to the Netherlands. Schooling is the main issue, especially finding the right school for our boy with Asperger's. Would he be able to cope in a regular Dutch secondary school? Will we be able to afford putting him in a good international school? He is a typical, naïve, expat boy, with an English accent and no knowledge of what is 'hip and happening' because he lived abroad for 10 out of his 13 years.

I think I would like to stay abroad for our next posting and to have our boys finish their secondary education in an International IB school. The only problem with that, is that my eldest boy will be far away from us. Something he doesn't seem to mind, but I do....

So at the moment I have a quiet life and a restless mind.