Yep, got kicked out.
Not Kai and Shen - Tina and me.
We are fortunate, in that we have a good Chinese language school here in our community. Kai attended last year, but we felt that the structure was a bit too formal for him and Shen this year. It also meets at a challenging time for us on Sunday afternoons. As it turns out, the teacher Kai had last year, Sunny, has her own little tutoring program, and is teaching a preschool class on Thursday evenings in a little space she's rented in an office building downtown. This has turned out to be a great fit for us. There are only a few other kids, and the parents always stay for the class. This has actually been a bit of a distraction for Kai and Shen. For while we can help them with the activities, they also compete for our attention and test to see which of us adults is in charge of discipline.

So last night at class we were the only ones there for the first half. Sunny had an activity out for the boys when we got there, they were sorting different size beads onto sticks: small, medium, and large. I mean xiao 小, zhòng 中, and da 大. As we finished this activity, Sunny says, "I wonder how the boys would do with just me?" At first we thought maybe she was just joking, but then she said, "You guys could go and have a cup of coffee and a little time to yourselves for a few minutes. Wouldn't that be nice?" And then Tina and I thought maybe the boys would do better with her if weren't in the way. But then we worried the boys might get upset if we left. And what about the whole bonding issue with Shen? We still have so far to go with him and we haven't left him with anyone other than Cam and Ben for a couple hours once. Then Sunny said she thought it would be good to try. So we told the boys we were just going to go upstairs in the building for a few minutes and would be right back. Kai was a little unsure at first, but Shen was more than happy to say goodbye and see us out the door. This of course didn't help our concerns about attachment, but then we were out the door. We ended up walking down the street and going to a Starbucks for a cup of coffee. We sat down for a few minutes, then headed back to see if everything was okay. From outside the door we could see that another little girl in the class had arrived, and apparently Sunny had chased her mom off too. She was reading them the story of Little Red Riding Hood in Chinese (and English at the same time), and the three kids were all just fine. We quietly waited in the hallway until the story was over and Sunny was transitioning to the next activity before going back in. There were only a few minutes left, so we all got in a circle and sang a couple songs to finish the class. Sunny said the the kids did really well on their own and that maybe we should try it like this again next week.

So that's how the boys' teacher managed to very tactfully kick the parents out of class. I have mixed feelings about it. I was learning in class too, and I miss that, but I think we were getting in the way of the boys learning. I don't know as Shen is actually "learning" Chinese in class, as he speaks it already, but it gives him an hour a week with a native speaker, and he seems to really enjoy that.