this is the story of a girl.: it happened.

I didn't want to. But I had to.

After four months I finally said goodbye to all the students.

I thought saying goodbye to my kids in Ukraine was hard, but this was so much harder. In Ukraine I didn't have to say bye to over 50 kids.

This week started out great! On Tuesday we had dinner at Joni's host family's house. It was so fun! We had pasta that was absolutely delicious! And the kids kept giving us chocolate. We had so much fun hanging out with them. They are such a fun family. Tickle fights and wrestling. Reminds me of my family. She is so lucky to have lived with them.

But then the goodbyes happened.

On Thursday we had to say goodbye to the elementary level kids because they only come on Tuesdays and Thursdays. They did a great job during their Spectacle with the younger kids. They had a little party with lots of goodies and then we had picture taking time before they left.

I was doing a great job saying bye to the kids, making sure I got to hug all of them. I didn't feel like it was the last time I would be seeing them. I would just be seeing them again on Tuesday. But then I looked over and saw sweet Kamila crying next to her mom and then it all hit me in one big wave and I couldn't handle it. I started crying. I gave her the biggest hug and told her I loved her and if she ever came to America I would go to wherever she was so I could see her. And that goes for all of the kids.

Friday I had to say goodbye to the rest of the kids. I tried to spend as much time as possible with all of them, which was really hard because that meant I had to constantly bounce between 4 classes.

The other kids had their Spectacle later Friday night and they did a great job too! It was pretty entertaining. There were Pre-K kids running up to the stage and giggling, and some of the primary kids were misbehaving a little, but I didn't stop them. It made it more like them. Plus the parents were getting a kick out of it.

After the performance it was hard to say goodbye to all of the kids because there were so many and the parents were ready to leave. I got to say goodbye to all of the Pre-K kids though. They are so cute. I have seen them grow so much the past few months. They wouldn't speak a word in September or even really sing without their parents singing too, but now they sing and speak and try to communicate. The kids obviously don't understand that we are leaving, but the parents did and they cried with us.

All of the kids mean the world to me. When things got rough for me it was them that kept me going. They made me laugh and smile and I knew they loved seeing me as much as I loved seeing them. I'm gonna miss them seeing me and running to give me hugs. I'm gonna miss being tickle attacked and not being able to get away. I'm gonna miss being latched on to and the kisses the little boys would sneak. I'm gonna miss it all.

We all came back to the apartment with Dima and his family after we left the school. We had a little pizza party for ourselves. It was nice to have one last hoorah altogether. It was so hard saying bye to all of them, too. Sophia and Nikole are the best.

Today Hayden, Kelby, Joni, and I went and played soccer with Joni's host siblings that are also in our elementary class, along with Lukash, Amanda, and Amanda's dad. It was such a good time! I have no idea why we haven't been doing this more often. We had it girls against boys. Girls won. Of course. There was snow and ice on the ground, so I definitely hit the ground quite a few times. Not to mention the boys like to beat up on me. So they took me out, too. After soccer we played a few other games like hide and go seek. Lukash and Mose also had the bright idea of setting off fire crackers. So we did a few of those. In doing that we discovered that the "gun shots" we hear all the time aren't actually gun shots. Well, some of them might be. But the majority of them are probably just boys wanting to blow stuff up.