Interim Week 2012

There is an interesting experience here that I just LOVE!  For this week, fifth through 12th grades at our school will be gone! (I love the experience, not the fact that our young people are absent...)



Fifth grade is only gone for 3 days, and it increases a day every year.  The High School left last Friday to return on Thursday, I think.  High School had their choices of several different trips, most, if not all, are service-oriented with educational opportunities and some fun thrown in.  From building water pipelines for remote villages, helping at orphanages and filling the needs in remote parts of the country to seeing Beijing (camping on The Great Wall), Xi'an (Terra Cotta warriors) or Chengdu (baby pandas), these tweens and teens will all come back as different people than they were when we said our goodbyes.

When I say that fifth grade's trip is simpler than others, it's all relative, I guess.  They go to Nanbeihu for a team-building, adventure course.  Fifty-one 10-year-olds left at 8AM on two buses in six different color-groups with their support staff of teachers, administrators and parents.  For many, this is the first time 'away from home', which seems a strange way to classify it, because most are seasoned world-travelers, and this should be a piece of cake.

Being away from home and being away from family are very different things.   Some were excited, others squirrelly; a few were just calm.  William surprised me.

We've dragged our kids all over creation, so I thought nothing of this trip.  William spent 5 days with a buddy this Summer, so I thought nothing of this trip.  He's with the same kids he sees at school, so I thought nothing of this trip.

As I watched him walk around in circles, pulling his new suitcase along and stopping intermittently to hug me, or follow me out of the group while I took the above picture, I realized that he's thinking differently about  this trip.

There will be adventure.  There will be team-building exercises.  There will be Chinese food for three days.

I put a smiling boy on the bus, equipped with a new cell phone as an early birthday present.  He gave me a thumbs-up before they pulled away and a text at lunch-time that he'd tried something new.  "Pretty good chicken pretty bad potato".  At 12:35 he let me know that they had arrived in Nanbeihu.

I'm looking forward to hearing about hiking, kayaking, repelling, leaping from a 70-foot pole to catch and swing from a trapeze.  It'll be awesome!

And he probably won't be the same guy who left this morning.  But he'll still be my guy!