We Wish You A Merry Christmas!

It's less than a week until LCI's Christmas celebration, and we've been preparing like mad!

Apparently, on Christmas Eve (our last day of classes before vacation), the kids will be visited by not only Santa Claus, but also a magician!! I'm so excited!! ... I mean... THE KIDS are so excited!! Also, I've been asked to help emcee the Christmas festival, so it'll be fun to sort of have a front row seat to all the thrills of Christmas!

I also got my bulletin board all ready for Christmas - it's a smorgasbord of snowflakes and snowmen and stockings and children's faces... And I love it :)



Here's a closeup of some of the silly snowflake faces:



And some of my older classes have been helping me make snowflakes for the window:



But the most important part of our Christmas festivities is the song contest. Many of you will remember the spooky ghost song we performed for Halloween... Well, the kids didn't bring their "A" game, and we didn't win any prizes. They were disappointed, and I've been trying to turn that disappointment into motivation to do better this time around.

It's been a fight on many fronts (and not neccessarily with the kids), but we've decided on "We Wish You a Merry Christmas." I'm pretty sure they sing it "Good timings we bring to you and your cats" but it sounds almost right :)

Without further adieu, here's Emily Teacher's 6-1 class spreading some Christmas Cheer:



You gotta love 'em. I do. They're my little monkeys.

Love you all!!

Feeling Better

The doctor said I should be back at 100% in the next three days, so woo hoo! And I'm certainly feeling more alive than before.

I want to thank all my friends and family for leaving comments, and letting me know how much you all care. It's been great reading them, and really warms my heart to know I've got so many people who take the three seconds to post a little "Hi Emily" comment on the blog!

Oh... wait...


:) Love you all!

I'm Sick :(

Some of you may remember the Milk School post of long ago, where I mentioned that I just wasn't germ-phobic anymore... Well, maybe I should be.

Tuesday, mid-morning, I was suddenly hit with a horrible sore throat and body aches. I stuck it out, and came home and crashed (after laying on my hot floor and shivering violently... my guess was fever). Wednesday was no better, so I asked my supervisor to make me a doctor's appointment. Over lunch Wednesday I went to an ENT specialist just up the road. He told me I had a fever, so my floor-lying was justified :) He also said I had pharyngitis (I think that's what he said), which is, according to Wikipedia, a sore throat. Hmm. That's what I came in for.

Anyhow, he said it was "pretty serious" and he prescribed a drug cocktail and full rest. Of course, full rest meant I went back to work and finished Kindergarten and taught my first two elementary classes. Steve was kind enough to take over my third class, so I could come home and fully rest.

I woke up this morning feeling WAY worse than before. The throat pain has spread to my ears, and no amount of Aleve is alleviating the pain. So I tried to call in to work. Unfortunately, today was a parents meeting at the school. My supervisor said they didn't have enough coordinators to cover my class in the morning. I found out later she meant "The parents will be walking around, and we want to make sure there's a white face in the classroom." So after crying to my mom on the phone, I went to work.

I guess I must look exactly how I feel, because as soon as I walked into the classroom Ryan said "Teacher, what?!?!" And I responded "What, what?" To which he said "Um Teacher NO beautiful..." That's the broken English way of saying HOLY CRAP YOU LOOK LIKE HELL!

Anyways, they let me leave at lunchtime, thank God. So now it's off to bed until tomorrow morning.

Thanks for letting me rant! Love you all!

I Love My Kinders' Parents

So every week we send home weekly reports to the Kindergarteners' parents telling them about how fabulous their child was that week, and ostensibly keeping them updated on their learning and behavior. Most of the parents write notes back, generally about the weather and how it is important to "keep away from catching cold, especially because homesickness is much harder when you are ill."

Today, I got two of the best parent responses yet.

First, Ryan's mother wrote about Ryan's "My Book Report" homework. This is a notebook in which the child has to pick a sentence from a book they read, write the sentence and draw a little illustration about it. Ryan's drawings aren't the best, but the kid is trying.

His mother wrote (and this is a loose paraphrasing): "Ryan doesn't do the drawing very well. But every time he expects compliment. So then I must become a liar. But I don't think the pictures in his "My Book Report" are very good. Do you agree? :) "

I about died laughing at this!!!

Then, we have Sun Q. He is my ornery little S**T who should be in trouble all the time, but he's just so darn funny. This is the kid who purposely folded the front cover of his workbook back and wrote some other student's name, just to trick me.

Recently, he handed me this folded up note, and very sweetly said "I love you Teacher." I fully expected to open the note to find a drawing of me as a princess, or some little sweet note (as the girls often tend to give me). However, I found as I tried to unfold it that the little monkey had glued it shut!!! It was too funny, and I had to write a note about it in his Weekly Report (especially since I think his mother has a good sense of humor).

She wrote back to me "I asked Sun Q why he give the note glued shut - he just laugh and say it was all his idea. I guess he have same funny as me. I hope it did not hurt you too bad!" and she drew a little funny face.

No, Sun Q's mom. I wasn't hurt. Rather, I was thrilled to have more blog-fodder!

Love you all!

It's snowing!

...and it's beautiful!

Cole and I went for our weekly Sunday Ice Cream Dinner and as we were walking it began to snow. Just little flakes at first, but they quickly became huge cotton-balls falling all around us. It was gorgeous.

I thought about catching them on my tongue, then remembered that pollution in Seoul is a wee bit higher than Kansas. So it probably wouldn't have been the healthiest thing to do :)

In any case, I hope it sticks.

Love you all!

Thanksgiving in Korea

It seems like I'm always posting about holidays the month after... Which seems odd, especially since I'm living in the future. But I actually have an excuse this time - I didn't celebrate Thanksgiving until the Saturday after.

Last Saturday there was a big Thanksgiving buffet at a Canadian bar in Gangnam (in Seoul). It ended up being pretty good, even though they kept running out of mashed potatoes. But I got all the other basics: turkey, stuffing, and pumpkin pie.

This is Angie and I celebrating the pie:


Angie, Catherine, and I - all grateful that only God-fearing Christians celebrate Thanksgiving:


This is our assigned "Thanksgiving Family"


They even played the horrific Cowboys/Seahawks game from Thanksgiving day!


Not gonna lie - as much as I hate the Cowboys and was disgusted by the game, it felt AMAZING to be watching football again!

The only drawback to Thanksgiving in Korea (besides not celebrating with my family) was that I missed out on the regular "post-holiday reunion" that I usually have with my best friends at Old Chicago. Well, they let me know I was missed, and that I was with them in spirit (and on paper) -


If you look closely, there's an exact likeness of me on that notebook paper. They are artists and scholars!

Love you all!