Saying goodbye

Oh, the heart wrenching sadness of leaving these kiddos. The poor babies only sort of understand we'll be leaving, but I think they understand it enough to get that we will probably never see each other again... Hopefully that is not the case, I want to go back!!! It was a sad evening in general, following a very tiring day. We played in the snow with our last class (awesome) and then I spent the day packing up my horrific mess of a room. I had a lot of school supplies.... every. where. On the way to tuck in the kids, I totally slipped in the ice and landed on my bum. That really hurt. Once I got to the dorms, I was able to keep it together pretty well. I made sure to visit my favorite kids (not that I have favorites or anything... heh. heh.) last, and visited lots of others first.

Me right before crying my eyes out. 

 Annnnnnnnnnnnd it's over. I started to cry, which means Daniel started to cry. Sorry baby! I felt SOOOO guilty for making him cry!

 Phil, me, and Daniel. So Phil was actually like the worst kid ever. He tried to be good, but he ruined many a beautiful craft by taking a glue stick, scissors, tape, or craft glue to them. I learned a lot about unconditional love and patience from him. While saying goodbye, he was crying so hard! Like, wailing in grief! And not because I was crying, he was just that devastated. So, I decided to be the adult and cheer those kids up.

 Yay! I cheered Daniel up! I was really worried about him. At the very end, he just kept holding and rubbing my hand and saying "Teacha ok, teacha ok" over and over again. Then, he taught me his Chinese name, Wefan. Seriously, it was like an emotional scene from a movie. I'll paint you s scene;

Me: "I love you Daniel! Wo-ei-nee"

Daniel: (grabs my hand and points to himself) "Teacha, no Daniel. Wefan."

Me: (points to him) "Daniel Wefan?"

Daneil: "No teacha Larkin, (points at me) Teacha Larkin, (point at himself) Wefan, no Daniel." 

When I figured out that Wefan is his real name, he got so excited and gave me a huge loving hug. I love this boy!

 Unfortunately, Phil was not cheered up. I hid a bunch of candy under his pillow so hopefully that's a happy little surprise for him.

I'll miss you, sweet kiddos!

You know you're late to class when...

Well today’s lesson went way better than yesterdays, and no one ate moldy bread so that was a plus. Romeo looks fine so I guess he didn’t get sick. He still had an appetite as made apparent by the crackers he stole from me when I wasn’t looking. That kid drives me crazy!!!

So today I left for class way later than I should have. We’re supposed to be at class 10 minutes early, so at 7:20. I left the dorm at 7:26 and that was a really bad idea. I dashed out and pretty much ran down the stairs and I could hear someone else behind me so I though “ok, I just gotta beat the person behind me!!!!” So I dashed down the stairs and out the door and as I was speed walking I looked next to me and a Chinese teacher was there and she started to run because she was late, too, so I started to run and I turned around and Caiti was there and we both started cracking up. So we both sped walked so fast that we passed the 3^rd most late person and we totally beat her to class but we were still both late. If the Chinese teacher next to you is running to class to be on time, you know you're really late! I got to class at 7:31 and of course Kelly the local coordinator was standing right there so she saw that I was late. But I dashed in and the kids were already lined up so it was ok since they had just got there but if I had been any later that would have been really bad. The kids are usually good for about 30 second after their Chinese teachers leave them so I had made it just in time before they started creating chaos in the classroom.

Halloween Horror

It’s almost Halloween so here’s a horror story. 

Today my lesson was making sandwiches out of moldy bread, but they obviously didn’t eat them. I would make a sandwich and put leaves and clean tissues and toothpicks onto the bread to make a yucky sandwich. It was a lot of fun to see the kids reactions and about half the lesson was on not eating yucky food, especially not moldy bread. It was a good lesson and in my last class they pretended to eat the bread, then reenacted puking and dying and stuff like that so I thought the message was pretty clear “you don’t eat moldy bread". (It was literally covered in green mold because I forgot about it for three weeks.) At the end of my last class they weren’t listening so I had them help clean the classroom and they threw away all the fake food and the sealed bag of moldy bread and tissues. I thought the lesson had gone well and I only had a few minutes left in class when I heard kids yelling “TEACHA!! TEACHA!!” and I turned around and Romeo the king of pills was standing over the trashcan with the bread bag ripped open and a huge mouthful of bread. EWWWW!! Why WHY would you do that??? I freaked out and had him spit it in the trash can and tried to get him to spit it all out and I think he got most of it out but another little girl named Chris also ate a little of it and I don’t know if she swallowed but I told her to spit it out, too. I was terrified thta the kids would get sick and I would get in trouble and the Romeo kept saying “Teacha, me no bleh (pretending to throw up) me no yucky” but I wanted him to know it was not ok that he did that so I pointed at him and motioned that he was going to throw up. In the end, both kids came to class the next day perfectly fine so I guess they're ok! That was definitely a scary teaching moment, though!