We are not the type of family that works out everything out in advance. Take the case of Aidan's and Lydia's pre-school. When we moved to Lido we did not have a new school lined up for them. Yang did some initial research and didn't find a school to our liking. Either not local hire friendly (read expensive, unless you have a fat expat packages) or too local. For a few weeks Yang drove the kids to their Chaoyangmen Wai school called Sanliturn kindergarten.  The 30-60 minute drive each way was far from perfect.

One day a few weeks back the kids came home with class pictures. I took Lydia aside and ask her to point out her friends. She pointed to five or six kids, a mix of boys and girls. I asked if any mean kids in her class and she pointed at one boy. I then asked Aidan the same question. He pointed to three girls and called them friends. He said none of the boys like him, that they hit him. I asked him for the mean boys and he pointed to a couple of them.

Aidan gets picked on for being small and being nice. Truth be told he is much smaller than the other kids his age and he is much nicer than the other kids his age. To deal with people calling him small, he's been saying wo shi zhongguoren meiguoren 我是中国人美国人"I'm Chinese and American" as if this explains everything.

Then almost as if it was a plan, Yang found a new "international" kindergarten a five minute walk away. I put international in quotes because it isn't the 20K USD school geared towards expats with an education allowance. The school is international in the sense that they accept international students, in Lydia's class there is one other international student but the teacher could not remember what country the boy is from. The school also has dedicated Korean classes serving the Korean expat community. When I visited the school with Yang, the facilities seemed good, the teachers nice, the classrooms an appropriate size. The only problem was Lydia looked to be too mature for the kids in her class and Aidan looked to be too small for his class. The boys in his class looked like giants, as if they've been held back several years with the express purpose of teasing him.

Yang and Aidan said good-bye to their old school. Everyone missing them, especially the teachers who said they were extremely well behaved. To which I thought, "Lydia?".

Lydia with her closet friends at Sanliturn

Aidan and the boys

After a couple of days in they new school I asked Aidan and Lydia how they liked it. Both said it was good. I asked if they had made friends, both said yes. I asked if there were any mean kids, both said no. Aidan said both the boys and the girls like him at this school. I think maybe he will fit in more often in the new school and that would be a nice thing. A nice thing for sure.