A Full Saturday

I've been behind again on blogging, Mom started a blog for her mission and Becky has been blogging lately which has pushed me back to wanting to get caught up.

I started my by getting up and doing laundry, cleaning the kitchen and getting myself ready for the day (I've noticed that with my losing weight and becoming happier with myself that I have a lot more selfies, haha). Lipstick is a new thing for me but it makes a huge difference!

I had seen something a couple of weeks ago on Facebook called Children's Entrepreneur Market. It is a farmers market style thing completely ran by kids (they manage the booths, are supposed to make the sales, use the money, etc.), I thought that it sounded like a cool idea and the event was happening here in Lehi at Thanksgiving Point. I had invited Libbey and the kids but she wasn't feeling up to going so I took Alexia and Sophie. It was super cool, over 150 booths, many of them with things that the kids had made themselves (games, food, slime, magic tricks, bracelets, etc.).  

 This was probably Sophie's favorite booth, they painted her nails!

 It was quite impressive all that they got to do/buy with their $5!

 After the market the girls and I went straight to Ben and Sonia's for Nadia's bridal shower. The girls got to play with Isabel. At one point Isabel came up and sat between Rachel and I and promptly fell asleep.

 After the shower we went home. Libbey said that she needed to go and check on Kiera that she should probably be awake by now. I walked in and found that Kiera was wide awake, sitting up and playing with her shoes. She didn't even notice that I was there taking her picture for a bit but as soon as she did she wanted me to help with her shoe and then get her out.

 We ended the evening by going swimming at the community pool. Kiera was so cute, she would stand at the edge of the pool and throw the diving ring for me to get and bring it back to her so that she would throw it again (talking about it I feel like a dog).

She decided that she was cold and done so I got to do some snuggling with her.

Nail Be Gone

Have you ever had one of those moments where you go to a sporting event only to be a onlooker/cheerleader but somehow keep on getting pulled into the game? Yesterday my ward had a pick-up game of soccer and invited anyone that wanted to come, I don't play soccer but four of my roommates were going to play and I thought that it would be fun to go and support them (you know something to get me out of the house). It was a beautiful day with the sun-shining and I was enjoying myself but for some reason the ball kept on being attracted to me...I would say that it came flying at me at least 5 times!

The last time is what really did it for me though, I was looking at something on my phone when I looked up and saw the ball flying towards my face, I put my hands up to block the ball. The ball flipped up and went behind me, I suddenly noticed a little of tingling on my hand, I looked down and noticed that a nail was missing from my left hand! I started looking around trying to find it when Josh (from my ward) pointed it out to me 10-15 feet from where I was sitting, he said that he saw it flip from my hand and land there.

And that is how I got "injured" without even playing the game :)

Talents for Mothers

For those of you that missed it, last Sunday was Mother's Day, a day that we should take extra time to honor our mothers, our own and any mother figure in our lives.

The Hualien and Ji-An Branches didn't forget, they had a wonderful activity on Saturday in honor of Mother's Day. It was a talent show/food/dancing/massage activity. They began with the talents, the choir sang, primary children sang, a family danced together, children played the piano, Stephanie and Eliza played the recorder.

After followed dancing, a lady from the other branch taught everyone, it was fun to just watch. Last they had all of the "mothers" sit in a row and the primary children all had lotion put in their hands, they came around gave everyone neck and arm massages (some were even sweet enough to give their mothers feet massages). Allie and Eliza made sure that Andrea and I were well massaged and moisturized, they came back to us a couple of times.

It was very fun and sweet to watch the children be gentle with their moms as they massaged them and lots of fun.

Oh and then to top it all off they gave us flowers on Sunday during Sacrament meeting (it was rather funny because they handed them out in the middle of sacrament, they played music to keep it "more reverent," I don't think that it ever got fully quiet again)

Leslee's Big Day

Friday morning when I came to class I was handed an envelope from one of the other teachers. I opened it and inside I found a card from Leslee (one of my previous students and now a tutor student) and her Mom, inviting me to come to Far East Shopping Mall on Saturday to watch Leslee compete in a model show.

I was already planning on going there to do some shopping and jumped at being able to support Leslee (I had helper her a couple of weeks ago work on introducing herself in English in case she got invited to this competition).

She started out in this cute blue dress with a teddy bear clutched in her arms. She walked in and gave the judges a big smile and the traditional peace sign. Then she talked to the guy in Chinese for awhile, ran back stage...

Her family and friends were prepared with a couple of signs, it has her name in English and her Chinese name (Yo Tien Hwa)

...she came back out dressed ready to cheer. She was cute and did a dance to "Oh Mickey."

Her score! She was number 32 and the best that you could get was 30!

Afterwards Leslee and Alice (one of the 5 year olds) hugged, played, and ran around like little girls do.

Drum-roll please...out of 50 participants Leslee got 2nd place! So she along with these two others will be going to Taipei in two weeks to represent Hualien in a bigger competition.

They looked thrilled (or distracted at least :D) by their prizes.

I looked over to see Alice scrounging through my purse...naughty girl!

Our beautiful winner! (I'm not a proud teacher :D)

Going Fishing

Saturday we were using these little fish guys to build with, when it was time for the five year olds to clean up they decided to bury me with them, Rain decided that it would be funny to shove some down my shirt (don't worry I was wearing two shirts). I told them to stop putting them down my shirt so some of the others rushed to get them all out, they patted me down and I thought for sure that we had got them all out. But Saturday night when I was getting undressed I heard clank, clank, clank, clank and I looked down to see 4 plastic fishes on the ground, I started to laugh.
Oh the adventures you have when working with preschoolers :D

Sorry Baby!

Andrea’s sweet new bike has a baby car seat attached on the back (I guess that bikes with car seats are designed different and supposed to be a little more balanced than others, Yuling said that it is supposed to be a little like training wheels—we are hoping that they will help Andrea). Because of all the stuff that we had bought we had “buckled” one of my bags into her car seat thing. I was riding her bike after mine when “kaplunk” when I hit a pothole, I could hear the bag in the car seat rattle and move a little bit so I said “sorry baby.” So after that every time I hit a ditch (I may or may not have purposely searched for potholes after this :D) I would apologize to the baby.