Day 17

Day 17 - A picture of something that has made a huge impact on your life recently.

Many of my friends that are doing this have a new child that had an impact on their lives, I too have children (close to 90 in fact) that have an impact on my life. When I first signed up to go to Taiwan I did not expect what a huge influence it would have on me, I gained a stronger love for children and an even stronger desire to teach them. I love these kids and their families so much, they were all so kind and loving...I miss Taiwan, the food, the culture, and it's people everyday and I'm so grateful that I had that learning experience and opportunity to go there.

The Ugly, The Bad, The...

A friend and I were having a discussion the other day about kids and how she isn't very excited about having them because all she seems to hear from people is the bad and ugly--"throwing up, weak, swollen (pregnancy), screaming, wetting the bed, not listening, coloring on things, etc." Why is it that so often when parents talk about having kids it always seems they talk about the bad and can't seem to remember any of the good. I understand that having kids isn't all peaches and cream that I should know ahead of time some of the hard (I like that instead of "bad) things that may happen but I also want to hear the good.

Like take this week at work for example---the two year old wet the bed while taking a nap, I'm probably not going to remember that part, but I am going to remember that my first day of work the 4 year old wanted to make sure that I was going to come back and watch them the next week. And my 2nd day of babysitting the 2 year old wanted to come home with me. I would much rather remember those tender and sweet moments than when I walked into the kitchen and found every single can on the floor (which the 4 year was very good about and put every single item away without me asking).

I still want to be a mom and work with kids, despite some of the horror stories I may have heard (and experienced myself), but there may be some who get completely discouraged and pushed away from the idea of being parents. So lets work on making our stories "The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly" not "The Ugly, The Bad, The...?"

(Sorry to be kind of negative...I've just had the same kind of conversation with a couple of friends lately about not wanting to have kids because all they hear is the negative stories and I don't want that to happen. I don't want to think it's all good and perfect but I want them to know that there are some wonderful moments with children too.)

Family Photos

Can I just say how much I love my job and getting to work with these kids? Some days they make me want to strangle their necks and pull out my hair but then I look at pictures like these and I can't stop smiling/laughing. Last week we were talking about families and one thing that we did was take "family photos" in the 2nd class we had a boy picture and a girl picture and each person got to pick their own props...love that Jimmy has a pink headband on and that Max is holding a red fan, plus you've also got an awesome Ruby Monkey!

Forts

Friday for my middle class we pulled out the beds from the wall, tucked some blankets into the bed and chairs and voila...had some forts! They weren't quite as spectacular but the kids still had a ball crawling in circles around the beds, blankets and chairs. I heard constant chatter and laughter the whole time.

I Can Make My Own?

This weeks afternoon class theme is vegetables and gardening, tomorrow's lesson was to be corn but when Yuling came to school this morning the snack for afterschool was to be cooked corn on the cob so my lessons got re-arranged.
I thought that my afternoon classes went really well today, we walked across the street to look at some corn fields and then we went to the kitchen where each kid got to take the husks off of their own mini corn on the cob (weird thing---they eat the purple/red corn here, they like it because it is chewy kind of like sticky rice is how Teacher Stephanie described it to me), then we washed them and put them into water to boil. We also got to pop some popcorn on the stove top (we used one of those camping kind of things that come in a tin pan and you hold it over and it pops---they don't really do at home popcorn because they think that it tastes bad and just get it at the movie theaters).
After school Yuling brought out pans of cooked corn (boiled) I just thought that it was super cool that they got to participate in the preparation of their after school snack, they probably don't think that it as cool, but generally they don't have anything to do with it except eat it. I was proud/happy for them.
*I didn't think that I was going to have enough stuff to fill the 45 minutes this afternoon, but by the time we sang our few songs at the beginning of class, walked over and looked at the corn fields, husked our corn, popped the popcorn, and eat the popcorn we only had 5 minute left so I just showed them two popcorn songs that I had found on youtube---didn't even end up using half the stuff that I had prepared!