2022 was another train wreck of a year… Some really great stuff came out of the chaos, but it’s hard to not feel sucker-punched by 2022. I thought it might be good to just sum up some of the major things that happened.

1. Although it was growing strong as late as October 2021, my main business AllSet Learning was hurting by the end of 2021. Over the 2022 CNY holiday, I knew I had some hard decisions to make.
2. In May 2022 I accepted a full-time position as an IB high school English teacher at bilingual school in Shanghai called Qibao Dwight.
3. I spent summer 2022 transitioning so that my small team of full-time staff at AllSet Learning (and the part-timers at Mandarin Companion, to a lesser extent) could learn to keep operating without my daily involvement.
4. I got away to Sanya (beach resort in the south) with my kids at the end of July, and ended up getting away just before there was a COVID lockdown there. Close call!
5. Fall 2022 was pretty rough, as I learned how to be an IB teacher, how to be a high school teacher, how to be a full-time classroom teacher… and also continued to keep my businesses going on the side, as best I could.
6. The kids, meanwhile, were able to enjoy the main perk of my new job: they could start school at an international school (all classes except Chinese class) in English. It’s called SCIS and follows the IB curriculum. They love their new school. (Less homework, smaller classes, and class is more fun.)
7. This is a bit of a one-way road… now that they’ve started at an international school, their grades cannot be transferred back to the Chinese curriculum. So they need to keep going to an international school as long as they’re living in Shanghai.
8. With the exception of the little trip to Sanya, we’ve done almost no traveling (anywhere in China) throughout 2022. This is really chafing at us! I haven’t been to the US since my dad’s funeral in January 2019. The rest of my family hasn’t been to the US since Christmas 2018. Mom, Grace, and Ella visited us in Shanghai for Christmas 2019, before COVID hit in 2020. Those three moved to Atlanta in 2020, so none of my family has seen the new place either.
9. My whole family got COVID in December 2022, starting with Alana staying home Dec. 13th because she felt unwell (it was her last week of school before her school’s winter break). I got sick Dec. 15th, followed shortly by Shen. We were pretty much all sick that weekend of Dec. 17-18, and it was bad. Isaac never actually tested positive, and if he got sick at all, it was a light case. Although we’re all negative again, we’re still sort of “recovering.” It was not “just a cold;” it was a bad flu (unless you’re Isaac, in which case it was nothing).
10. We had a nice family Christmas at home. Presents-wise, the kids were happy. Shen and I treated ourselves to a nice new mattress (overdue!), a night at the movies (Avatar 2), and fancy Japanese-style toilet seats. Wow, wild and crazy living…

So we are SOOOO THANKFUL that China is finally putting COVID behind it, filing it away in those horrible years labeled “2020-22”. We have plans for a family trip to Yunnan during the CNY holiday, and we’ll be visiting the US again (finally!) in summer 2023!