Feelings

This is how I've been feeling lately. I hate the end of the school year for my kids. It's one year older and one year closer to independence. My oldest has 2  years left now before College. My youngest will be a 4th grader! My middle is graduating from 5th grade next week with a big shindig and all that fancy kind of stuff.

Time is slipping through my fingers.

They grow too fast, their demands on me are different from what they were just a year ago. Some days they need everything from me and the next they need nothing. I feel like a tightrope walker at times, trying to give them just enough  independence to learn while at the same time trying to balance their safety. I often feel like just sitting in the middle of that tightrope and holding them all at EXACTLY this point in time.

Truth is, I like just about every phase of my kids' life so far. There are good and bad with every age and at times I have wished for time to go faster so they were past those bad stages. But now,well now all I want is for them to STOP! I miss those times where College and graduations were so far away you really didn't need to think about them. Now it is so close I can practically smell it!

Time is slipping by faster and faster and I feel it is only picking up speed. I can't stop it but I sure hope I can remember to enjoy the good and bad times. 

Kickin' and screamin'

I once was told about a family that left Singapore "Kicking and screaming". At first I thought I don't want to be that person, I want to get my fill of Singapore and move on in a nice and dignified way. A whole year and some later I have come to find out that I am not going to be dignified at all and I will NEVER seem to get my fill of this lovely place. Yes, we are moving back to Utah and I (and the rest of my family) will be kickin' and screamin' the whole way.

When we started out on this adventure we never thought we would fall in love with Singapore. We knew it would be something different and that we would try to learn as much as we could. We knew we could end up hating it here and now looking back I almost wish we would. It would make leaving so much easier.
We have met many wonderful people from all over the world and some we are lucky enough to call friends. We have learned things about other cultures that we may never have learned any other way. When we go out now we hear many different accents and languages that we can now place and label. We have been down under and visited a communist country. We know how to use chopsticks and we love sharing our meals. We have ate foods we never had heard of 2 years ago and now we don't know if we can live without. We have encountered stereotypes, both our own and the view of others.
Yes, I will go back to Utah kicking and screaming. I will never get enough of this culture. It is so different than what I was raised with and I still find myself in awe sometimes, and sometimes it is hard for me to understand their ways. But I no longer judge, it is okay to be different and all these different ways work. Some of these differences I'll adopt for myself because they make sense.
I will never get enough of meeting people from all over the world. People who I may never have met before but I can't imagine my life without now. People that I have so much more in common with than previously thought, even if we did grow up on opposite sides of the world. We are all the same in different ways.

I will miss the sites and smells. The busyness of daily life. The learning of different ways.  I will even miss the frustrations. I will miss the adventure, always trying new food or of adopting new practices. I will miss the colourfulness. And I think I will miss who we have become while here. I like this adventuring family whose motto seems to be GO FOR IT! 

I will always be grateful that we had this time here. I would love to have more, maybe someday but for now we are US bound, undignified because that's just the way I want to roll, kickin' and screamin'.