We live in China!

We live in China. HELLO!!! We live in China. Sometimes I forget that believe it or not! It really hit home a week ago Friday when Andy and I were in a taxi coming home from a lovely night out with Jeff and Daneah. We were crossing the Nanpu Bridge at 11:30 and Andy's phone rang. I thought it was Jeff and Daneah calling, but his words were quick and to the point. "OK. We will be home in 15-20 minutes." Ms. Zhou's exact words to him were this; "Maddie sick." My first thought was that this is the first time in two years that our incredible ayi has called us while we've been out. My second thought was WHY didn't I continue with my Mandarin lessons? We communicate great in person, but on the phone? Not so much!

In the end Maddie was not as bad as I had imagined on the 45 minute taxi ride home. Her fever was high and it held on to her fiercely for three days straight. By then she was coughing so bad that we kept her home from school anyway. She was stir crazy to say the least and was very ready for school on Thursday. She spent all Thursday morning trying to convince me that it really was okay to wear her jammies to school that day (her last day of school on Friday was PJ Day)! It was a good yet rough couple of days for her as she just wasn't quite herself, but she was able to participate in lots of fun stuff over two days! Ms. Preeti wrote the following in the class newsletter:

For several months now, a group of children have been very interested in trucks and are making increasingly more complex road and building structures with wood blocks. I have been monitoring their play and it seems to me that it is inspired by the construction sites they must see from the school bus on their way to school every morning. This interest is apparent in their journal entries as well as stories that they have been dictating to me. This week, we went to look at the construction site of the soon to be made HS building on our own campus. This site is ideally located as we can go to the first or second floor of the HS and see it from the big windows- a perfect viewpoint. We will be making regular “field trips” to this area to watch the buildings come up.

We have been reading and learning about leprechauns and shamrocks to celebrate St. Patrick’s Day (March 17). It is rumored that a leprechaun has been seen in the Early Childhood Section of SAS, Pudong. There have been some funny things happening in our classroom - a couple of times, when we came back from somewhere; we found the room messed up...(photo collage of leprechaun activities coming soon!) merely frivolous or fun.

So here's what I've learned this week: Your children get sick everywhere and anywhere in the world, you get to celebrate St. Patty's Day at school without having to worry about the separation of church and state, and I should've continued on with my Mandarin lessons no matter how busy I was at the time. Thank goodness we live in China!