How We Do School

We don't have an actual school space so we use the corner of the living room, where baby can play on the floor nearby.  Sometimes the girls like to pretend they have real desks though.

 This week Juliana and Adalyn happily donned princess and Minnie Mouse backpacks and headed off to school together. Juliana is starting her last year of Chinese kindergarten. She technically graduated kindergarten last year with the rest of her class, but since she's not yet old enough to start primary school we wanted her to go another year.

We first talked to the school about this in April. They said ask again in July. We asked in July; they said ask again on the next to last day. That day they said come back after school is finished. Then come back on the first day of school, September 1. But that day all the leaders were gone at meetings so on Monday, finally, Kevin went with Juliana and was able to talk to the principal who said, “Okay, she can start today.”

Ready to head to school.  We take Juliana on bike or both the girls in our little electric cart. (Look at those jackets! We officially survived summer!)

Kindergarten in China lasts for three years, starting at 3 years old. Each class stays together with the same classmates and teachers for all three years. This year Juliana will repeating the oldest grade. She has new classmates and teachers, who seem very nice. It will be a transition, since most of her old friends have moved on to primary school, but fortunately she is already familiar with the school and they with her. While most kindergarteners attend from 8am-5:30pm, we pick up Juliana at noon so she can do home school and have down time in the afternoon.

Adalyn is starting her first year of preschool! She is going two mornings a week to a small school held in an apartment with only about 12-15 other kids. The teachers are very nice and speak a little bit of English, and it's a laid-back, play-based environment. On her first day, Adalyn headed straight for the toys with barely a goodbye. She is pretty pleased about being big enough to go to school like Juliana. Her school is about 25 minutes away, so we'll be spending a lot of time carting back and forth, but fortunately it is in the same direction as Juliana's school.

We plan for Adalyn to start kindergarten next year, so I think this will be good preparation. I don't feel like academics are necessary at this stage, but it will be helpful for her to be in a Chinese environment and around other kids her age. She hasn't been very interested in speaking Chinese lately, so I think this will be motivating.

In the afternoons, after rest/nap time, we will be continuing with home-school. Juliana did “early kindergarten” last year and now will be doing K/1. You don't have to worry too much about grade distinction in home-school, which is convenient with two late-September babies who are right at the cut-off. I think our home-school will look a lot like last year.

Adalyn joins us for songs, talking about the calendar and weather, and practicing a Bible memory verse. She usually stays around to listen to our FIAR read-aloud book, if it's not too long. We've been doing Five in a Row for 1.5 years. Each week or two we do a unit focusing on a different children's book. We read the book aloud each day and do language arts, social studies, science, and art activities related to the book. Next year we'll probably move on to something with a little more structure, but I have really liked this for early grades. It is very gentle and experiential.

For instance, this week we are starting with a book called The Salamander Room. We'll learn some about salamanders, talk about animal habitats and go on a nature hunt, make and decorate salt dough salamanders and create a little habitat diorama. Juliana will dictate her own imaginative story about having an animal live in her room and paint a picture to go along with it. As we go along we generally examine the artwork in the book, talk about different basic literary elements, and talk about some of the interactions in the book.

The girls collected nature items to make habitats for their salt dough salamanders

Juliana also does Math U See and All About Reading. She likes the games but is less enthusiastic about the practice required. I like both the curriculums pretty well and plan to continue on with these in the future. Adalyn likes playing with math blocks and doing the reading games.

I am planning to do a little bit of a “Letter of the Week” curriculum with Adalyn this year too. It has some letter recognition, pre-writing skills, cutting and sorting activities, patterns, and that of thing. We'll see how much we actually do. Sometimes Adalyn likes to have some work to do along with Juliana, but sometimes she just wants to play.

Some days school goes well and feels inspirational. Other days it is pulling teeth to get absolutely anywhere and we spend 40 minutes trying to get through a few math pages. So, pretty normal. It is a lot harder to get Juliana to focus when she has already been in a school setting all morning, but kindergarten is great for her Chinese development and social needs.

Overall I enjoy home schooling but I also really enjoy sending my kids off to school sometimes.  We'll see what the future will look like, but right now I'm glad that we can take part in both worlds!

One year + one week down, 18 or so years to go... 

[fade off to me quietly screaming in the background]

Linking up with Velvet Ashes: Teaching

What I Would Say to You

Dear Mama Friends,

This is what I would like to say to you, and perhaps you need to hear it. It's what I would like someone to say to me, although it's easier to say than to believe.

You are not a terrible person. I know sometimes it seems like children bring out the absolute worst in you – all the frustration and anger and selfishness. But you are actually the same person you used to be; it's just harder now to kid yourself about how awesomely kind and loving you are. Think about how much patience practice you have gotten over the years. Even if your patience is still not enough to last the 24 hours a day that you need it, you are more patient now than ever before.

You are not doing it wrong. There is that baby who sleeps all night from 2 weeks old. There is that toddler who potty trains in 2 hours. There is that child who teaches herself to read at 2 years. That is not your child. That is not most people's child. It's completely normal for babies to wake up during the night, and to start waking up again once they've stopped. Yours is not the only toddler to poop anywhere but the potty. And it's supper frustrating. But it's not because you have missed the Perfect Window or the Vital Step or the One True Way. It's because every child is different and life is just messy (literally) and much more complex than we'd like it to be. It's not you.

You remember the moments when you snapped and acted like a sleep deprived two year old. And your kids might too. (Let's be honest, they'll grow up and blame you for everything no matter what. That's what therapy is for.) Those are such big moments right now, moments that seem to define everything. But in ten or twenty years your kids will mostly remember sandwich triangles and silly songs at bedtime and all the little moments colored by security, trust, and someone there who cared.

You are not failing. It sure looks like it sometimes. You cannot possibly stay on top the mess. You don't cook enough vegetables. You did not create magical memories for the first or hundredth or last day of school. Some days (years?) your children will invariably act horrible and you will be certain you are raising them to be terrors. They don't sleep. They won't focus on school. They won't calm down for two blessed seconds. They are far from perfect, and you are far from perfect, but you are far from a failure. You battle frustration and lack of accomplishment and invisible progress every single day and what do you do? You get back up again the next day (or every few hours all night long) and start it all over again! Day after day after day after year. If that's not success, I don't know what is.

Those dark circles are beautiful. They tell of so many nights of self denial and caring for others. That saggy stomach sheltered a tiny human being or three or four. Those stretch marks show how you literally stretched yourself to the limit for the sake of new life. Your hair is turning gray before your eyes – because even your hair has worked so hard at this business of life. Your whole body is showing how you have lived and how you have given. All those imperfections whisper of the tears and losses and anger and disappointment that you don't like to let show; they give away how hard this has been. They show how strong you are. The mirror might show something that seems worse than before, but you are a wonder.

What you are doing matters. All those menial, meaningless loads of laundry and trips to the potty and time outs and cleaning up markers off the floor and washing snotty noses and helping focus on another math problem and quieting the screaming and making another dinner. You are providing your children with food and clothes and keeping them safe and helping them to learn some kindness and responsibility and math, and where would they be without that? Human children are pretty helpless. They need you. They follow you around everywhere you go talking incessantly because they want to be with you.

What you are doing matters. In itself, by itself, this is incredible spiritual work. You are literally feeding and clothing the least of these. You are washing feet and showing the extent of your love. You put others' needs before your own day and night. You hear your baby cry, and you answer him. You lift him out of darkness and draw him into your arms, giving comfort. You offer your physical body as a sacrifice.

You are weary and discouraged and wonder if you will ever again do something that feels meaningful, something that you can finish. But this right here, this is IT. This is life. You were made for this life, for this every day, and you are doing it so well. Let us raise our coffee mugs together in solidarity. We are doing this. Carry on.

Ruth

One Word 2016: Moment

It's not even the end of February and I've already had a baby and written about my word for the year. So yeah, I'm pretty on top of things.

Life with a newborn is all about the present moment. Nothing can really be planned - as soon as you sit down to eat or lie down to sleep, baby is suddenly ravenously hungry. For her there is no future. Either she is nursing or starving. She is cuddled with mama or she is unfathomably alone.

The needs of a two year old are less constant but nearly as changeable. One moment she is giving sweet kisses and the next she is screaming bloody bedtime murder because she wants her blanket on but doesn't want her blanket on and it's the wrong person doing it in the wrong way. There will be moments of silliness and toddler slyness and far too many moments of potty training and running away screaming and then suddenly one day Baby Addie isn't even a toddler anymore, she's a threenager (cue ominous music).

It's so easy to get tied up in the minutes of the day. Minutes of sleep and sleeplessness. Minutes til everyone needs shoes on walking out the door. Minutes until the next nursing, until dinner is supposed to be ready, and how many minutes will this tantrum last? Minutes til bedtime and not nearly enough minutes until morning.  This year will be filled with a lot of loud, in your face, strain your patience, labor intense minutes. I won't treasure every minute. Some minutes are just not that good.

The minutes can go by slowly, in the middle of the night, or in the third hour of nursing, but the moments speed fast. Baby squeaks and curled frog legs turn to searching eyes and first flashing smiles. When I look back I want to remember the floppiness of a satisfied sleeping baby.  I want to notice the  toddler's mischievous grin as she wraps arms around my neck, I want to appreciate the dancing five year old yet to discover self-consciousness. 

As this our presumably last baby already moves through new stages, I realize how brief this season of life really is.  I don't want to rush through or begrudge this season.  But in the midst of it all, it can be hard to see beyond. My life looks to be an endless procession of one handed tasks and days divided by a series of catnaps. Any non-mothering dreams will stay on the back shelf. I will be quietly buried under a pile of laundry.

I want to remember that these moments are important. When I am accomplishing nothing and haven't made it outside the apartment because it would take five hours to get everyone ready, when I have been doing and saying the same things over and over with no measurable progress, I want to remember that these days still matter.

These are the moments of nourishing my baby and teaching her to trust. These are the moments of sternness, of gentleness, of silliness - of letting my middle child know she is seen and not forgotten. These are the moments of teaching my oldest how to read and to love reading, of helping her adjust to changes at school and loneliness over losing her classmate-best friend. These moments shape lives.

September Catch-Up

If you were wondering what has been happening in these last few months of blog silence...
1.We spent the summer in America, hitting up Kentucky, Tennessee, Georgia, and California.
2.I’m pregnant!
3.And it’s a girl!
4.We came back to China.
You probably knew that from Facebook, but in case you missed it, now you’re caught up.

Juliana was particularly thrilled to be getting another sister. I'm not sure Adalyn cared too much one way or the other, but she did like the wig.

We returned to China two weeks ago. It was a 36 hour trip and far less than fun. My personal favorite part was throwing up a bunch in the Beijing airport and feeling truly horrible. I could hardly stand up, but we had to catch another flight - in a different terminal 20 minutes away. So Kevin wrangled all the luggage while I carried a sleeping Adalyn and tried not to pass out. There was also that one time they couldn’t find Adalyn’s ticket in the computer, and the other time we lost my boarding pass as we were about to board, and some other times of screaming (just Adalyn, not me). But in the end, we were all still alive.

We have done a lot of moving over the years - new cities, new apartments, new schools. If you have moved a lot, you know what a great feeling it is to come back to the same place. Our familiar city where we know people and can find things, our same apartment - no moving in required. There is something about coming back home after months away and putting your clothes up in your own wardrobe that is very satisfying. We have now lived in the same city for 3.5 years (a record!) and the same apartment for 1.5 years. I don’t take that settled feeling for granted.

Now that our suitcases are stored and we are once again sleeping through the night (well, theoretically, except my allergies are kind of ruining that), we are working on getting back into routine. Our school technically starts this week, but we our first holiday this week so Kevin won’t actually see his students until Sunday - make up day for Thursday’s classes. While he still has a lot of planning, Kevin has a much lighter class load than in the spring.

This week Juliana joyfully started back to Chinese kindergarten. She has moved up to the third floor with the big kids, but fortunately the same classmates and teachers all stay together! They have graduated from spoons to chopsticks for meals, so Juliana needs to work more on chopstick skills. Juliana had two days of school, then was disappointed to also have a two day holiday.

We also started home school kindergarten! We will continue using Five in a Row (a unit study curriculum using different children’s books) that we started for preschool last year.  We’re also adding reading (Get Ready/Set/Go for the Code and All About Reading) and math (Math-U-See). I plan to take it slow since Juliana is already in school all morning, but I think we’ll enjoy it.

This peaceful attentiveness lasts for at least 5 minutes.

Adalyn is sad to see her sister leaving again every morning (particularly since she has to stay home), but she has done well with a little more quiet play and mama time. She also seems to be remembering her Chinese pretty well with ayi and is picking up new words. She is also happy that home school has started back. She enjoys doing school like a big girl - at least for ten minutes of singing and repeating days of the week and such. She is a big fan of Math-U-See since it has lots of little math blocks she can play with while we work.

As for poor baby #3, who gets so little attention, she is about the size of a bell pepper. I have felt her move a few times when I actually pause to notice. Adalyn likes to pat (smack) her through my belly, and Juliana has already named her Cinderella, and speculates she will be born with rainbow hair. I think the lack of prenatal attention will be made up for in lots of sisterly attention after birth. Adalyn loves being around babies and helping to “take care” of them. Currently Adalyn and Queen Elsa both have dollies in their tummies. No wait, Adalyn’s is a kitty.

When I just told our ayi I was pregnant, she said, "I thought you were looking fatter! But your arms were still thin."

I am 18 weeks pregnant - just two weeks to halfway! I have been significantly less miserable this pregnancy than the last, many thanks to Unisom. I still felt pretty sick this whole summer, but I was much more functional and didn’t even throw up every day. Now that we have settled back in, my nausea has mostly abated. Unfortunately terrible allergies have kicked in to take its place. I’ve never been a huge winter person, but right now I can’t wait for cold weather.

So right now we are getting back into routine. While I have half a dozen organization projects I really want to get at, realistically the house is about as clean as it ever is for more than those rare, glorious 15 minutes. I have started cooking again and been doing a lot of dusting and mopping. The allergies and lack of sleep are getting to me, though, and I’m having trouble finding the energy to do anything extra - like plan anything with students! I’m struggling to figure out how to do the things I’d really like to be involved in (which is more than last semester...hmm) while also keeping reasonable expectations for this year of pregnancy and babyhood.

Kindergarten

I wound my bike between the dozens of other bicycles, motorbikes, and cars pulled up in front of the kindergarten.  All around parents led their 3-5 year old children through the gate, past the alluring playground equipment, and toward the castle-looking school building.  The children all carried backpacks - covered in princesses, cartoon characters, and superheroes - half as big as themselves and mostly empty.

I helped Juliana down from the bike seat, her own Minnie Mouse backpack bouncing on her back.  "Look!  It's my school!!"  Juliana cried excitedly.  She had been talking about starting school for the past year, and the day finally arrived.  I could tell she was feeling pretty important, albiet a little confused, because for a long time we have been telling her she would start school when she was four.  Technically, she will be in school for three weeks before she turns four.  Almost-four-year-olds don't deal in technicalities.

We stopped first at a nurses station just inside the door where a nurse checked each child's hands and throat.  She handed Juliana a red plastic chip to show she was healthy.

As we climbed the stairs to the second floor, where the 4 year old classes are held, Juliana held the child handrail and carefully placed her feet on the painted footprints leading upstairs.   Her teacher greeted her kindly as we entered her classroom, and Juliana remembered her "laoshi hao."  I put Juliana's backpack and jacket in the cupboard while she happily placed her red health chip in its slot.

Twenty-some children already sat at tables, quietly playing.  Juliana spotted her Norwegian friend across the room and hurried to join her.  The two blond-haired, blue-eyed children certainly do stand out!  Juliana's friend has already been in this class for a year, but the other children watched Juliana curiously.  I said goodbye to Juliana, but she was already involved in play.

When I returned at noon, Juliana ran happily to me.  The teacher told me Juliana cried a little bit before I came, but she ate well (she eats breakfast and lunch at school).  Juliana cheerfully waved to all her classmates.  The other children were finishing their lunch and climbing into beds pulled out for naptime.  They stay at school until 6pm.

On the ride home, I asked Juliana what was her favorite part of the day.  "Dancing!"  No surprise there.  Every day the whole kindergarten gathers outside on in the play yard to dance or exercise together.  Dancing has been her favorite part of every day, along with time on the playground "running and screaming."

 Finding out what else happens at school is a little trickier.  "What else did you do today?"  "Oh, I played.  A little boy hit me."  Every day, there is some variation of a little boy hitting her.  It's hard to tell if that actually happens every day or if it happened one day and just makes the account every day.  Either one seems like a decent possiblity.

We have a lot of exchanges like this:
"What did you eat for breakfast today, Juliana?"
"Hot milk. I like hot milk."
"What about for lunch?"
"Hot milk.  Just hot milk."
"Wait a minute, you were still eating lunch when I came, and I saw you had some soup."
"Oh yes.  We had soup.  We had some orange bubbly drink.  It tasted strange."
"Hmm, I don't know what it was.  Maybe something with vitamins?"
"They were yucky vitamins."

Halfway through the week Juliana's enthusiasm was momentarily dampened.  She got up saying, "I'm a little bit sick today.  I don't think I should go to school.  I'm grunting a lot."  But by the time she was heading out for school, she was excited again.  On Saturday morning when I told her there wasn't any school, she said, "But whyyyyyy??"  She quickly recovered when I told her she could stay in her pajamas.  She would be happy to stay in her pajamas all day, except that I don't let her wear them out of the house.

Kindergarten is off to a good start.  I am really grateful for my super-social, crazy-energetic little girl to have somewhere to go every day to enjoy being around kids (even if she can't communicate well yet).  And I'll be honest, I have been enjoying my calmer mornings hanging out with Adalyn.  I can even get some things done since Adalyn doesn't usually demand constant attention.

Every day I also ask Juliana, "What was your least favorite part of school?"  And most days she says, "Nothing!  There is nothing I don't like!"