Blogging Again

I finally have time to pay attention to my blog again. I've been super busy and something had to give. Here is what you missed while I was away.

Cainan (and the rest of the class) changed seats and he is now at the yellow table instead of the green table. This is big news.

I found 16 cents and four rocks in the dryer.

Kinley has had 5 different babysitters over the last week.

We haven't been in bed before midnight in 10 days.

Ryker got an A on his first ever written report.

Brian worked after school and weekends (with kids in tow) to finish installing all of the SmartBoards and projectors at the school.

I rehearsed and performed my community theatre play, Blithe Spirit, 9 times last week.

See why I couldn't post anything?

The Shakedown

Last May I read an article entitled "The End of the Year Shakedown". It was written by a mom who was brave enough to stand up and say that she was not going to give any gifts to her child's teacher at the end of the year. She felt like it was ridiculous to reward someone for doing their job. No other professional expects his/her clients to lavish them with gifts every Memorial Day. She referred to the new trend in collecting money from all of the kids to purchase one big gift for the teacher as "the end of the year shakedown."

I pretty much agree with her thoughts, and don't give gifts to teachers either, partly because having been a teacher I know that they dread the collection of hand lotion, trinkets and apple shaped pottery more than they cherish them. (And FYI, unless you are a close personal friend they are not going to eat any homemade stuff that you send in. They know where the kids hands have been.) I feel like a card expressing my thanks for a job well done is more than sufficient to show my gratitude. But more disturbing than the required end of the year gifts is the new outrageous "beginning of the year shakedown".

Not only did it cost me $93 to register my Kindergartener for school (including $20 for snacks) I also had to pay $28 for his shots. I'm required to take him to the doctor for a physical which will cost me my $25 copay, and in addition to that there is a new state law that he must have an eye exam ($45) and a dental screening ($65). So for the grand total of $256 he can have the priviledge of attending school....where, by the way, we will be asked to purchase outrageously priced Market Day food in order to support the school and avoid having to participate in door to door fundraising.

Did I mention that I have another child that requires some of the same medical exams and registration fees so that he can enroll in 3rd grade?

Did I mention I paid the public school system over $2000 of my property taxes this year?

I understand the registration fee. I even understand the snack fee. I get why he has to have shots...no one wants infectious diseases running rampant through the Kindergarten....although I don't believe in the chicken pox vaccine, but that's another story. But if he goes blind and all of his teeth fall out it isn't going to hurt another living soul.

You cannot legislate good parenting, Mr. Blagoevich!

Mexico: Cuatro

La Historia (The History)

We were able to do quite a bit of sightseeing in between our work days at Niños. It was wonderful to see some of the famous historic sights in and around Mexico City. Here are just a few snapshots of them. On Sunday we went to Teotihuacan, the site of the Pyramid of the Sun and Pyramid of the Moon. These huge structures were built by the native inhabitants of the region (neither Aztec nor Mayan, contrary to popular belief) in the first half of the 1st century. In addition to the pyramids there are also dozens of other structures and roads. It was quite an amazing site and we had a lot of fun there.

Deb, Anne and I climbed up the Pyramid of the Moon, but they don't let you go all the way to the top on that one. It still affords a good view of the other pyramid and the surrounding areas.

Braving the rain and watching out for lightning, Anne and I climbed all the way to the top of the Pyramid of the Sun. That is no small feet considering we were climbing some of the steepest steps I've ever negotiated at almost 7,000 feet of elevation. Needless to say we were huffing and puffing.

Outside the pyramids there is a botanical garden, of sorts, that is home to many of the native plants of Mexico. I've never seen cacti so big in my entire life. Some of them were 8 or 9 feet tall.

Those little balls at the top of this one are called "tuna" and are peeled and eaten like a fruit. I didn't try one but they supposedly taste like kiwi and have lots of little seeds in them that you have to spit out as you eat it. (See why I didn't try it?)

Later in the week we went in to Mexico City to tour El Palacio Nacional (The National Palace). The president doesn't actually live there, it's more like a museum, but there are some government offices there. Much of the palace is devoted to the memory of Benito Juarez, the most famous former president of Mexico. He is considered to be the liberator of the country. We got to see his private residence and the bed where he died. We also learned a lot about the history of Mexico, particularily during the Juarez era.

My favorite part of the palacio was the Diego Rivera murals. As a Spanish major and a Spanish teacher, I have studied and taught the Rivera murals for years. It was awesome to see them in person and stand right there in the palacio where he stood when he painted them. I got a lot of good pictures of all of the murals, but I won't bore you with all of them. Here are just a few. These are 14 feet tall and sometimes 30+ feet wide and they all depict the history of Mexico in different eras.

I wish that I also could have seen some Frida Kahlo works, since she is the other famous Mexican artist that I have studied and taught, but none of hers were displayed in the palacio. I'll just have to settle for seeing her likeness in one of Rivera's murals. (That's here in the red, V-neck dress at the bottom of the mural above.) She was his wife, you know.

Just around the corner on El Zocalo (the center plaza of Mexico City) in the Municipal Cathedral. It is a massive cathedral that looks pretty much just like every other Old World cathedral you can imagine except for the fact that it is crooked. Yep, that isn't bad photography. The whole place is sinking. According to the plumb bob inside the building has moved 84 inches in the past 800+ years. One side (the right in the above picture) has hydrolic jacks under it, but the other side doesn't yet and it is still going down. As a matter of fact, originally you had to climb up 6 steps to enter the catherdral. Now you have to go down 2 steps to go through the doors.

Since I'm not all that in to saints and candles and gold leaf I didn't take all that many pictures of the cathedral. However, the enormous pipe organ (with both horizontal and vertical pipes) was pretty impressive. The other thing that made an impression on me in the church was the sign that said, "No se necesita un celullar para hablar con Jesuscristo. Por favor lo apague." ("You don't need a cell phone to talk to Jesus. Please turn it off.")

We also got to eat at a couple of mexican restaurants (not Taco Bell) while we were out and about. In Mexico City we ate at Sanborn's. The food was good, but the best part of Sanborn's is the atmosphere. The restaurant is located in downtown Mexico City in an old palace. The palace was converted to a restaurant in 1903 and it has been serving delicious mexican food ever since. The outside of the building is completely covered in handpainted ceramic tiles, giving it the name "The House of the Tiles". It is really a wonderful place to eat. And after you eat there is a gift shop and a confectionary shop in the lobby. We got some really delicious chocolates there.

The other restaurant we went to was "Las Tejamaniles". The name refers to the particular type of wooden tiles used on the ceiling (teja) of the building. But, for a reason that wasn't quite clear to me several people in our group called it "The Hole in the Wall". It was a cute little restaurant where they cook out in the open right in front of everybody. They have a big open air garden in the center of the restaurant full of beautiful plants and a fountain. The management gave us all little handpainted clay pots when we left. That is where I tried my first bite of cactus (not bad), had my first chocolate malt (delicious), and used the construction paper that was hanging on the wall in the bathroom as toilet paper (I don't recommend it unless, as was the case here, there is no other option).

Probably one of the biggest cultural experiences we had though was getting to go to an indoor soccer game to watch several of the Niños kids play in their league. (I couldn't get any good pictures through the chainlink fence that protects the fans and the lighting wasn't sufficient either.) Even though I know nothing about the sport, it was so fun to sit and cheer for them and watch them defeat a team of adults at least 10 years older than most of them. Can I just say that indoor soccer is quite a physical and dangerous sport! The boys were excited and happy to have such a big cheering section in the stands and we all loved it too.

Overheard....

...outside the public bathroom at Riverfront Stadium, or Great American Ballpark, or whatever coporate name it is going by this week.

Ryker: That sink sprayed out really hard!

Cainan: I turned it on and it got me all wet. But don't worry, I've still got my personality, it was just water.

....on Facebook last night.

Shouse: I never thought I'd want to see the Vice President in a swimsuit.

The Persecuted Church

One of the blogs that I read pretty faithfully is "We Are THAT Family". Kristin shares stories from her normal, crazy life. This is one of my favorites and here is another one. She is an amazing writer. I laugh out loud almost every time I read one of her entries.

Until today. Today I cried.

She has recently met (right in her home town) some refugees from Uzbekistan that were forced to flee their home and families because they were sharing the gospel. As they share their story with her, she is sharing it with us on her blog.

I would really encourage you to read the amazing story of this family and their faith. It sounds like something from 1950s Russia, but it happened just a year or two ago. There is also information on the blog about how to monetarily support this family and the work they are still trying to accomplish in their country even from thousands of miles away.

To read Part One of the series go HERE.

To read Part Two of the series go HERE.

To read Part Three of the series go HERE.

To read Part Four of the series go HERE.

Mexico: Tres

El Trabajo (The Work)


(I've been postponing this post while I wait for more pictures of some of our work projects. The pictures still aren't here but I'm going to go ahead and post it anyway. I'll let you know when I have some new visuals to add to this entry in the Mexico series.)

The 12 of us actually travelled to Ninos to be a work group. We had specific projects that we were supposed to help them complete before school started. We arrived on a Sat. night and after a day of church and siteseeing on Sunday, we were finally able to start our work projects on Monday morning. We were all chomping at the bit.

I was personally assigned to workbook duty. The school operates on a system of workbooks, or paces, that the students complete at their own pace. We transported several new workbooks down with us in our luggage and the groups that had come earlier in the summer had done the same. Those workbooks needed to be filed in their proper location and ALL the workbooks in the place had to be inventoried.

So Deb and Vicki and I sorted and counted and filed and inventoried for several hours....and all without suffering so much as a paper cut. (Unfortunately I don't have any pictures of this to show you.) The workbooks are kept in the school superintendants office. So he was in there making phone calls and having meetings while we were spreading hundreds of workbooks all over his floor. He just smiled and stepped over the piles.

After that was completed Deb and I tackeled the English library, or as it can be more acurately described...the storage closet. Anything that they didn't have a place for or know what to do with they were stashing in the library. There was stuff piled everywhere, making nearly impossible to enjoy the books housed inside. The library was somehow also used as a classroom, even in its current condition, so we really needed to get it cleaned out and organized. This is what it looked like when we began.

We spent two days cleaning, sorting and organizing. We gave the walls some new colorful paint and dressed up the windows. We took all of the books off of the shelves and washed them, then reorganized the books as we put them back. We put all of the teaching materials in one section, all of the videos in a section, all of the preschool books in a section...you get the picture. It wasn't hard, it was just time consuming. When we were finally finished this is what it looked like.

In the meantime Anne, Julie, Maureen and Bunny were painting the MASSIVE living area in Esperanza house. This huge living/dining room was quite the undertaking, especially since the house parents didn't want their hand painted stencil painted over. Yep, they had to trim around the stencil that went all the way around the room. It took them two days just to get that room painted.

Bonnie and Arlene were busy organizing the clothing closet. Churches from all over the US and Canada donate clothing for the kids at Ninos. All of it is stored in a rather small room on the campus at Genesis. Bonnie and Arlene sorted and labeled it according to gender and size. They've made it much easier for everyone to locate the clothing that they need.

The guys in the group, Jim, Donnie and Rick were busy working on the porch roof at Genesis house. In Mexico everything is made of concrete...even the roofs. The previous summer groups had formed up the new porch roof and installed the rebar, but it wasn't quite ready for the concrete yet. There was a lot of "hurry up and wait" associated with the roof project. The guys were able to enjoy some time playing basketball with the boys and get some other smaller projects done while they waited for materials to arrive for the roof job. Actually, even though they worked on it all week they still didn't get to see the concrete go in. I guess the next group took care of that.

Once the painting was done at Esperanza and the English library was ship shape, we took on some new projects. Anne, Julie, Maureen and Bunny tackled the teeny tiny preschool room. They repainted it and sorted and washed all of the toys. They purchased new storage containers for the classroom and reorganzied everything. They found 40+ puzzles that were all mixed together in a giant bag. We spent our afternoon and evening trying to put them together. I think there might have been 15 that actually had all of the pieces. They threw away a lot of junk and replaced it with some new, nice toys and educational materials. Julie even bought some sheets and made them some curtains and a toy hammock for the room.

Deb, Vicki and I sorted the toiletries that had been donated. Each house has it's own 50 gallon drum at the main complex. When donations come in (like the 50 tubes of toothpaste and 30 sticks of deoderant that we brought...thanks to CVSing) they have to be sorted into these drums. Because they were going to be transitioning into different living arrangements (more details on this later) in just a few days the items in the tubs were no longer divided correctly. For example, there were exfoliating lotions and nail polishes and hair accesories in the barrell for Bethel house but all of the girls were moving in to Genesis house. So we had to dump everything out and start again, adding the items we had brought too.

The most exciting work I did while I was there was translating. Vicki was interviewing all of the staff at Ninos in order to study their educational system and provide them with feedback on how to improve it. Many of the staff did not speak English, so I had to tag along in order to translate for Vicki. It was so much fun to get to talk to, and learn from, the people working at Ninos. It was great practice for me and it was comforting to discover that I haven't forgotten everything I learned. I enjoyed speaking Spanish so much. One day I translated for 3 hours straight. It was great!

In the end I felt like we had accomplished a lot for the mission...even if we never got that roof done. Their facilities are certainly cleaner and more organized than they were before. Hopefully they could appreciate the improvements that we made to their buildings while they were on summer vacation.

Oooooohm

Cainan has taught Kinley how to meditate.

Not in a sit-very-quietly-and-think way, but more in a sit-indian-style-with-your-hands-out-stretched-and-your-fingers-making-an-"o"-shape-while-you-hum-"oooooohm".

I have no idea where he learned that (SpongeBob is my number one suspect though) or why he does it so often that Kinley picked it up, but it is totally hilarious.

Note: Since I orginally wrote this post I have been informed of two things.

#1: "Indian style is no longer an appropriate term. Now (according to Ryker and Cainan's teachers) we are required to call it "pretzel style" or "criss cross applesauce sitting".

#2: Cainan learned to meditate not from SpongeBob but from Paige...our neighbor girl and authority in all things, according to the boys, by virtue of the fact that she is older.

Manic Monday

In light of the current campaigns and upcoming elections I thought this one was appropriate for today.

This is the Part Where You Say Awwww!

Roses from my hubby.

So, he plucked them off of the bushes in front of the house. So what?

Ivy League All The Way

Are my kids bound for Harvard or what?

Ever since the Olympics they can frequently be seen fencing...in full armor I might add. And their favorite bathtime activity is to mix up imaginary chemical compounds that they have named "Soylene" and "D2R". (I'm hoping they're imaginary anyway.)

They're never going to get dates are they?