Students

(It's driving me crazy that it won't publish my paragraph breaks!!! I'm sorry!) **For second semester Adam and I made a change. I gave him all of my classes to teach, except one. I have to teach one class for legal reasons in keeping my visa. We did this so that he could just focus on work and studying Chinese in his office between classes, and I could just focus on the girls, helping Sophia with preschool, and taking care of meals, home, etc. Last semester was just too stressful running in and out of the house and passing off kids and duties, as we each ran to class at different times throughout the day. Having a more calm and consistant schedule has really blessed our family this term. **We teach all of the juniors at our school. Obviously I teach one class and Adam teaches 15 different classes a week. He sees each class one time a week, so he has around 1,000 students. One thing I've really enjoyed about now just having one class is that I can more easily learn their names (Chinese names are SO difficult for me to learn) and I feel like I can go deeper with the students. For example, a few weeks ago, one of the boys asked me to help him with an English poem for the poetry competition their class was holding. I thought he wanted me to just help him with his pronunciation, but he wanted me to help him perform it. It ended up being a lot of fun! The boy was Cheng Meng. He and two more of his classmates have now been visiting our home once a week, and I love it. They're fun to talk to. Before when we lived here in 2004, we had students in our home constantly, but this time around with two kids, our company has been more limited. Today they brought me a gift of a small decorative wooden comb and mirror set in a Chinese silk bag. **Sophia has a pretty sensitive stomach, poor thing, so it happened again that something she ate made her throw up. She threw up all through the night on Wednesday, so the past few days she's been resting and recovering. She's so strong about it though and acts like throwing up is really no big deal. She's so sweet. I'll say, "Oh Sophia, I'm so sorry you're sick." And she'll say, "I'm sorry, Mommy." **We have a neat cd called "Seeds" which turns B-bl- verses into songs. They're actually really cool, not cheesy. So today Sophia was singing one of the verses/songs. It was Psalm 34:18 - The Lord is close to the brokenhearted and saves those who are crushed in spirit." But today she kept singing over and over, "The Lord is the worst to the brokenhearted..." Haha! **Elise just laughs and makes us laugh all the time. Her new favorite trick is crawling up onto the couch. She's only fallen off once, and I think she learned her lesson, so I trust her up there. She's also been growing a baby mullett. I think it's time to get out the scissors. She has some books that teach her baby sign language. The other day we walked by the lake and she started doing the sign for "bath" and saying, "baa, baa." Then Wednesday we went to Adam's student's house for dinner and they had a big pond in their yard, and again she was doing the sign and saying, "baa."