February Ends

  

    I have blinked and another month has passed!  The remnants of Tet remained at school for weeks, but even they have been cleared away.  The flags remain, a happy daily morning reminder of how many different people will be a part of my day. February still feels like February, even half way around the world. OK, being able to sit pool side on a Sunday afternoon in the sun makes it feel a little different.  I try to soak up extra sun for all of my friends and family in places that have been so cold this winter. All is well with us.

     We still often use school as our off hours play place.  The size of campus is luxuriously large by Asian standards, and offers the most substantial place we have found in HCMC to run and play.  Here Sophie plays in one of the two new sandboxes.  Both can keep us happy for hours.

     So few of the pictures in this post are about Vietnam.  I know that we find less and less surprising and new.  Our life, I guess, has settled in.

       Fabulous tubby doos.

    Maeve was thrilled to find that we had 100 shells from our beach trip that she could take as her objects for the 100th day of school.

    We shared a nasty bout of a stomach virus with each other and even other friends' families.  Nice of us, eh?  I got it last in my house - just in time to not be able to get back from Tet vacation.  When I roused from my bed finally, I found this posted on my door.

     Charles paints with the girls quite a bit.  Here, Maeve was "inspired" by a Picasso picture book, creating her own portrait of Picasso's wife. I told her it was one of the best pictures that I had seen her paint.  Ms. Dyana later told us that during a painting session at school, she taught her classmates about Picasso and painted another version.  :  )

     Ready for the pool!  Swimming is still our favorite activity, especially on weekends.  Special attention went into pool outing outfits on the shown Sunday morning.

     The back playground at school.  We often hang out with colleagues and their kids for a Friday afternoon play session. Maeve is taking it easy.  You can see the Saigon River beyond her.

     The Dotys, who have boys the same age as Maeve and Sophie. David teaches high school math and Blair teaches fourth grade.  David's getting his first dose of Charles Waugh political discussion...

     It is fun to watch the boats go down the Saigon River right behind the school.  Most have hammocks on the upper berths where boat owner and workers sleep.  Often roosters man the front decks. I love watching the boats filled with fruit. My classroom window overlooks the river.

     Maeve has had a new explosion in literacy.  Ms. Dyana (her K teacher whom we love) pulled me aside to share this writers workshop piece.  She showed me one from two weeks earlier too, and it is exciting to see how much she is making sense of sentences and word phrasing.  She explains our purchase of new bikes - of course the first one too big.  She has decided to save it for later.

     We were greeted on this morning with "Happy Sports Day!"and ferocious tooth brushing and getting ready quickly.  Yep, it is amazing how similar field day can feel half way around the world.  I can't get over how much Maeve is growing.

     It was funny to chaperone the middle school dance last night.  It too was a scene that was predictable and in so many ways unchanged from even my own middle school dances.  Lots of not dancing, sitting on separate sides of the room.  You know, you've been there!  So I think that the one big difference at this dance was that no one was passionately making out in the corner.  PDA is a rarity  in Asia.  Certainly a plus when you are in the chaperone roll...

     What else happened in February?

•  Jay NcTighe, of Understanding by Design, did a conference at SSIS that was great.  My favorite part was meeting and working with people who teach all over Asia.  I laughed when I explained to Charles that I felt shorter at the Friday and Saturday conference.  The room was full of caucasians, and I felt markedly different than I have for the last six months.
  
• Maeve was finally the star of the week in kindergarten.  We all had lunch with her at school, she got to display all sorts of pictures of her and her family in the room, and her class created a book for her.  Lovely.
• I found out that I will remain in the middle school next year.  Disappointments and positives suround that one.
• I had a wonderful conversations with my mentors, friends, and colleagues Heidi Mills and Tim O'Keefe after figuring out how to load money onto Skype to use it through phone lines.  It was great to reconnect with them and hear about how the Center for Inquiry is faring.  There was a moment when I was in Maeve's clasroom this week, Rafi's Children of the World was playing ( a song that Tim sings regularly with his students), and I got a little teary.  I miss those guys and my colleagues at CFI.  I knew I would, but just every once and a while it really hits me.   

     School is fine but has felt like an especially large amount of work lately.  I do have some colleagues who I like very much. But with 5 preps and meetings with all of the departments, it is hard to keep connected.  Quite honestly, this is the most traditional school, from a curricular standpoint, that I have been a part of.  I miss the continuous, thoughtful, philosophy rich conversations that were a regular part of my days at the Center for Inquiry.

    The students are great, which makes it easier to not worry as much about the larger picture of all parts of school life.  Just by nature of the fact that it is a bigger school meant from the get go that the experience would be markedly different than my time at the Center.  I keep reminding myself that we made this move for reasons outside of the "perfect" job for me, and this has been a very good choice and life change for us right now.  And then there is the fact that there is so little left to the year really!  I have a week long trip with the seventh graders in April, spring break, and some long weekends, all within only three and a half more months of school.  And next year things will not all feel new.  We will be living in the same place, I will likely be teaching the same classes and a "veteran" here (few teachers have been here more than two years), and we will return from the States next fall knowing what our  days will be like. (I already have my detailed list of what I will pack!) It will be easier to determine what is hard because this is new, and what is part of this place.

    I am hoping to secure tickets next week, but yes, we will spend our whole summer in the states.  NJ with my parents for our first and last weeks, and hopefully a month at the cabin in Michigan.  We are really looking forward to it.

     I hope your part of the world is starting to warm.

     Keep in touch!