Tyler poses with his wife Yingying and their son Dominic. [Photo provided to chinadaily.com.cn]

Riding that wave of fortune also led me to my current job. I was lucky enough to have an article written about me in a local newspaper at just the right time. A spouse of an employee at the newspaper was a boss at an English training school here in Dalian. They were able to see in the article that I was getting ready to start my own business and asked around to find out that I wanted to open a small office providing consulting services to students looking to study abroad. As luck would have it, the school that was interested in me was also looking to begin providing consulting services to students wanting to study abroad. They brought me in, gave me equity and I have been running this department here at Just English (嘉得英語) in Dalian since November 2015.

We have been growing like crazy and it seems difficult to keep up at times, but we feel very grateful for the busyness. We have a great team here, full of hard-working, warm-hearted people. I feel extremely blessed to be a part of the team. Not easy to come by anywhere in the world.

To perfectly culminate the year of 2016, my wife, YingYing, and I were blessed with a precious little angel of a baby boy, Dominic. He’s incredible. Coming up on two months now, we’ve passed through the Chinese tradition of ‘yuezi’, which is during the month after the baby is born.

Although there were many things going on during that month that I thought were a bit odd, I still think it was worth it for the recovery of my wife after giving birth to our boy. Having a baby is not easy. Just after Dominic was born, I called my mother up to tell her how thankful I was for all of her hard work giving birth to me. Now I’m also finding out how hard it is to take care of a kid. An amazing experience though. It’s hard to leave my baby boy’s side even just to go to work for the day. I just want to be with him.

All in all, it has been an incredible year, one full of challenges and growth. I can’t thank God, my wife, family, friends and fans enough for my 2016. It’s going to be a tough one to match moving forward.