Families R Built with Love

Tomorrow is the last session of a local music class that KC and Lissa go to.

The classes will resume in the fall but with a new teacher as their beloved teacher has fallen in love and is moving across the world to China to be with his fiancee. He expects to live in China for the next 3 or 4 years until paperwork can be completed to allow her to come to the U.S.

The kids are devastated. They absolutely adore this fellow, who is an amazing teacher and has a great positive energy just radiating from him. I wish him well in his new life journey. I think it is exciting and fascinating. I wanted to travel a lot when I was a young childless person. Kirsty had zero interest in it, having travelled due to her dad's air force career as a child. She wanted roots, I wanted to try my wings. But I wanted the life we have together more, enough to put that on hold, maybe only for a while, maybe for this lifetime. I don't regret it a bit.

I have always been fascinated by the Orient and China specifically though. One of my favorite experiences as a teen was seeing the terra cotta army at a museum. I hope he sends a lot of emails about the things he sees and does there! In one of those "6 degrees" type of situations, this man's father is someone I see often through my job, so I will probably be in a good position to hear some stories of his experiences in China.

We decided to make a farewell card. I went on the Internet and found Chinese writing that spelled, "good bye," good luck" and his name. We took red construction paper (red being a color of good luck in China) and pictures of the kids. I was carefully cutting out the kanji to glue on the front of the card. KC and Lissa started looking at them and by the time they got glued to the front of the card, I no longer knew if they were right side up or not! We wrote the English "translation" next to each set of Chinese writing just in case our efforts had indeed rendered them gibberish. At any rate, it will I think let him know how he touched our children's lives, and help them say good bye to a friend.