There is a painting in our study of a Vietnamese man trudging through a padi field pulling two oxen. The trees behind have bright green leaves dotting the tips of their branches. Though I've been feeling like i've been dragging some oxen for the last two years, recently it has been beginning to feel as though spring and new biginnings may be coming to my life slowly.

Our youngest son Oliver has begun to walk and despite his tiny frame and our medical concerns for him, he seems to be happy. Our eldest son William loves his new school and has many friends. In addition there were some potential empolyers sniffing around me which I turned away as the timing is not right. All this feels like life is and will be ok.

I am finally getting this house straight even though we may have to move again in a couple of months. Hanoi is cooling down (relative to the summer heat) and the children and I are able to go outside in the afternoons. We have put a stop to the endless workers coming in and out, making mess and generally being a pain. I'm dreading the day we have to let them in again and they have to do all the things that need desperately doing to make the house safe. I think the only way we can do it is to go into a hotel for two or three nights and escape for a few hours a day from the chaos.

Next week Michael is away and I'm kind of planning a complete sort out of junk. It feels like a spring clean which can only signify new biginnings, right? I am the kind of person that likes to know exactly where everything is and that it is in its proper place. I love culling my life from time to time. Getting rid of things I haven't used for a while. Moving every three years helps with this process of course.

Tomorrow William has to wear the Vietnamese national dress to school to celebrate the mid-autumn moon festival. He looks too cute to imagine. Parents are allowed to attend assembly so I know I'll have a beaming smile on my face.

Meeting my 'dad' at the funeral may have helped to lighten my load. It is finally done. The dread and the not knowing is over. I'm not saying we now have a relationship. That will take time - a long time. I know I have made an important step.

I had a text from my mum to say her mother, my Oma, was pretty close to death. I got home, turned on Skype wrote to my online Aunt and found out she died ten minutes ago. I'm all alone with no one to talk to. The children are having their dinner downstairs with Tan.

I feel totally numb. We had been expecting this, on and off for years. I saw her last almost exactly three years to the day. I took newborn William all the way to Holland to her nursing home to introduce them. She never met Oliver. She didnt know who I was then but mum tells me she did enjoy holding William. She was so weak even then that his weight at two or three weeks was too much for her.

My whole spread out around the globe family will now try and make their way to their village outside Rotterdam. I want to try to go. Dont know if it is possible in the timeframe before the funeral to get there from Vietnam.

Her life was really similar to mine in some ways. She lived in Ecuador as an expat for most of her chilren's youth. She must have had similar experiences and feelings that I have as a mother away from home. She was a pretty strong woman though, where I wouldnt say that is the first thing people would remember about me. She wasnt someone who wore her emotions on her sleeve. She wasnt a cuddly grandmother. Partly because we only really saw her a week or so a year. Partly as it wasnt really her nature.

Nevertheless, I feel a loss. I feel sad for my mum. I feel dreadfully guilty that I am considering travelling the big trip there after her death but not in her life.

Just a rainy day in Hanoi. The irony of my life and that of my family is that although we live half way around the world from where we are from, our days are just as ordinary as the average Joe. Well kind of.....

I'm a thirty three year old British mum with two small sons living in an extraordinary place but for the sake of our sanity, trying to live an ordinary life.

There is something comforting about a daily routine. No matter where we live in the world we seem to crave the hum drum. We have been moving from country to country for the last ten years for my husbands work. I think of people who feel stuck in their seemingly ordinary lives, surrounded by what they feel is the 'same ol' this or that, and I long for a little taste of it. I guess we all want what we haven't got.

People often ask me how it was to live in Azerbaijan. Imagining that living in it's capital must have been anything from a dusty hot pit, to a sub-zero wasteland - depending on their imaginations. The funny thing in all honesty is that I almost feel I cant answer that question. I had two small babies in the space 19 months apart so for all I noticed I could have been living on the moon. Life as a new mum, no matter where you are, is all about the sleep deprivation and the worry.

Hanoi certainly seems to have more to offer a young family. As an expat, the community here is very international and extreemly friendly and welcoming. As we have been doing this life for so long, we have sort of come to know that the reality is that we will spend 99% of our time here socialising with non-nationals. Why is that? How can we live in a country and yet not know its people? It is extreemly rude of us but it is a form of laziness mixed with a form of preservation. We know we will be here for only a few years. Our children have such a limited sense of national identity for any country as it is, so for ys it makes sense to try to surround ourselves with as much of what we have thought of as 'normal life' as we possibly can.

This attitude. of course creates many challenges. It can lead to dissapointment and dissatisfaction if one is not careful. We have chosen this way of life - right? It is easy to forget that of course.

One has to try to find a balance where one enjoys what the local culture has to offer but also tryies to compromise and offer substitutes for what we crave and long for from home. All British people know that a cup of tea tastes better made in England, something about the water maybe? Where to buy good tea, for instance, becomes a topic of conversation. This is crazy since Vietnam is a large tea exporter! The point is it is not that you can't buy good tea necessarily but that you cant recreate the exact conditions at home.

This is the first country I have lived in where i have made almost no attempt to learn the language. There are a number of reasons for this. The first is that it is very difficult. Vietnamese is a tonal language which requires the speaker to have a finer tuned ear and a more contortionist tongue than most Brits are used to. The second reason is that, other than learning greetings for politeness and numbers for sheer common sense, I have surrounded myself with people who can oragnise things for me and who speak English. Arrogant? Yes certainly. Ignorant? yes possibly. Comforting? yes undoubtably.

It makes me sympathise with immigrants in the UK criticised for setting up their 'ghettos'. I am all for respecting culture and one's fellow countryman as a citizen but how tough is daily life for almost all of us for one reason or another. Add then to this the fact that new arrivals maybe homesick, craving a certain food, worried about losing ones identity, tiered of every encounter with daily life being a struggle to be understood and to understand why.

I find I constantly feel as though i have an elephant sitting on my chest. I feel that I need to display greater patience than is humanly possible on a daily basis. I need to be so considerate of respecting culture and other people's needs that I almost entirely neglect my own.