Coming Back (to our Blog)

It’s been about 3 years since we PashbyMauls began our joint blogging project.  Since then, we’ve written lots of travel posts about Europe and shared some bits of our life with whomever actually cares to read about it, but you will notice that after our move to Tashkent in the summer of 2015, we fell off of our blogging bandwagon and during this academic school year we’ve only managed about 4 posts total.  This is not for lack of things or places to write about!  A move to Tashkent and fair amount of travel within Uzbekistan during our first year here were the topics of a few posts. Last summer, we made an epic journey out of our summer vacation and traveled to Belgium, Paris, Italy, and Ukraine. 

We really wanted to “eat, drink and be merry” during that trip, so we didn’t bring along computers and only posted a few things from my iPhone.  During Spring Break this year we managed a fairly epic trip to Bulgaria and I traveled with 14 students to Prague for the Central and Eastern European Schools Association (CEESA) Band and Choir festival in the Spring (Thankfully, there was another adult along on that trip too, although it wasn’t Drew).  Processing life and bringing awareness from us to you about different places and ways of living has been difficult and unfortunately seemed to turn into a bit of a chore.  Every time I went to write a blog, I thought, “what is there that I have experienced that people will actually find interesting or helpful to read about?”

Another reason for our unintended hiatus is that we have once again experienced a transition year… Right after our previous transition year to Uzbekistan!  Luckily, this second transition year in a row did not include an international move, but saw some changes in both of our professional lives.  Drew stopped volunteering part-time at UNESCO and began working part-time at Tashkent International School (TIS) as the Activities Coordinator and he continued to study towards his Masters in Public Administration during the other half of his working day.  I moved from teaching PS1-Grade 5 in the PYP to teaching across 2 programs as I moved up to teach Grades 2-8 in the PYP and MYP, making this year my first year teaching in the MYP.  This also included beginning Strings teaching and beginning Winds teaching, but can you imagine that none of the choices we offered the beginning students was to play the oboe? 😉  That means that I brought a lot of instruments home during the first term and made all of those horrible sounds that beginning students make for Drew, Ponce, the cat who hates noise, and any unfortunate passersby on the street.  And yet another layer of our transition year was to work for the same employer as a married couple, meaning navigating morning getting-ready and leaving time together!

Needless to say, we are still passionate about sharing what we see in the world with our friends and family, but blogging on top of all of our commitments (and figuring out what we were doing professionally) was a stretch!  Now that it’s summer and we are in the States for 7 weeks, we will try to resurrect our old habit of sharing bits of the world with you.  Travel between NY-VA-NC-GA-MI-CT could be just the thing to jumpstart our habit!