Trumpets, please:  I am now the parent of a kindergartner and a first grader!  Wow, it can sneak up on you and, paradoxically, it can take forever.  Last week we took the girls to meet their new teachers.  Sarah will have the same teachers (plural) that Anna had for two weeks last May.  Anna's first grade teacher is also an experienced teacher who graduated from Seattle Pacific University (a college that is affiliated with the Christian college I attended.  SPU was also where I studied to get my TESL certificate.)  The meetings with their teachers went well and the girls made paper chains to track the number of days leading up to the first day of school.  Their school is pretty diverse.  Even though the International School they attend in China has students from many nations, I think the school across the street may have even more languages and ethnicities represented.  America is a melting pot.  So I'm sure we'll have a lot to talk (blog) about in the weeks to come…

The girls are both eager to start and we (Christa and I) are both eager for them to start.  It will be nice for all of us to have a real routine in our schedule that we have been lacking for well over a YEAR now.  In addition to attending school 5 days a week, the girls are also going to have weekly swim lessons.  They love to swim and we are glad that they can get some lessons while we are here in the States.

It's a brave new world that we are entering here.

Some have asked what will we do with all our newly acquired "free" time.  Christa has to master Mandarin Chinese and I have to write an award-winning book to be published in 2009.  So I guess you can say we won't have much going on.  We might even have some spare time to watch a little Oprah and Dr. Phil. 

In all seriousness, we have a lot we want to accomplish while our kids are in class.  And the speaking engagements will just keep coming for a while.  We should be able to get a lot of work done in this season before we return to China.