Happy Mother's Day!

First of all....

Happy Mother's Day to my absolutely AMAZING Mom!

Wish I could have spent it with you.

    

All week I have been teaching about Mother's Day at school.

Making cards and teaching the kids the song "You Are My Sunshine!"

~ 

Tuesday afternoon Hai Chien had a Mother's Day performance that I attended.

They presented cards and flowers to all the moms and surprise... Me too.

I find it a bit disturbing receiving a card that says "This is to mommy" but after getting cards from several other Mother's Day cards from the kids in my classes, I just pretend that they say "To my big sister."

They're sooo cute!

Here are some of my students performing a song on the eucalaylie.

Some more of my students doing karaoke.

The kids LOVE doing this. 

Gem and I performed the hymn "In The Garden" together.

It went pretty well for only having practiced for about twenty minutes right before the performance began.

Haha... Talk about waiting till the last minute!

Me and Lisa (one of the office workers at Hai Chien).

She's sooo fun!

Eva and Dora from my super fun 3rd grade at my Tuesday school with the

 special picture the class made for Mother's Day.

Sunday morning I went to the church in Dajia. 

The kids had a special performance were they sang some songs.

It sounded great, even though I couldn't understand much of 

what they were saying since it was in Chinese.

After church, Johnny and BreAnne, fellow English teachers with IBLP, came to visit.

We hung out at the Huang family's house for the afternoon playing dodge ball and Uno.

The Huang's two dogs, JeDee and Money didn't like Johnny very much.

I don't think the Chinese song and dance he performed for them helped at all, either.

 They are still barking ferociously in this picture... BreAnne and I 

(the sensible ones, of course) simply enjoy the show.

We all went out to eat for dinner and I got hot pot. 

Yummy! 

Just to note, I didn't eat the pig blood cake served with it!

~

It was a fun weekend, but I still missed spending it with my totally awesome mom.

<3  I'll be sure to make up for it next year!  <3

HAPPY MOTHER'S DAY!!!!

Randomness

Yes, it's been a long time since I've posted I know. So here come my excuses...

Tuesday I went into Dajia (for the first time by myself might I add) to mail a letter and then stopped at a stand and got some milk tea to celebrate my great achievement.

Seriously though, the roads in Dajia are all twisty and crooked. It is easy to lose you bearings if you don't keep your eyes wide open.

Anyway, I also got two cream puff type things because I remembered that Gem had been wanting to try them. Yes, two... I got one for myself as well as her. :)

Here is someone making them at a food stand. The purplish ones are sweet red bean. 

I got vanilla tapioca... I think.

~

Anyway, that night I kept waking up with a horrible stomach ache. 

To make a long story short I ended up laying around my room in the apartment for TWO days straight.

I think I can sympathize a little better with those who have been through solitary confinement. (not that I know anyone who has) But seriously, that's what it felt like! 

................................

I'll just skip over those two days......

....................

Friday, I was feeling good enough to go back to teaching.

(Well, technically I had to be or they would bring me to the doctor)

~

I was sooo thankful that God answered my prayers and I was feeling almost all the way better by Friday afternoon and was great the whole weekend, because I had to go to the annual English teacher's Retreat at one of the other teams locations about a 2 1/2 hour trip away. All 43 of us!

~

Here are a few pictures I took.

                                      

Saturday afternoon water balloon fight.

I participated in it for about 10 minutes, but I didn't pack extra clothes so I came up with a genius plan to take pictures so I could stick around to watch without getting drenched like the rest of them.

You can tell that Tim wants to throw that water balloon sooo bad!

Audra laughs at a safe distance.

The school location the retreat was held at. 

So cute and small!

I went on a walk with some of the others over this super cool long bridge.

This was my bunk bed for the two nights.

Don't be fooled, that mattress isn't as thick as it looks. In fact it really and truly felt like lying on a wood board. I was sooo sore after that weekend!

Here I am heading to the trainstation Sunday afternoon to head back to Dajia.

I was sad to say goodbye to my friends at the station as I was taking a different train.

This was the first long train ride I have taken alone and I only got my seat number wrong twice!

The problem was that I also had an old ticket with me and I mixed up the numbers. hehe

Thankfully, I can always play the "stupid foreigner" card and people are usually really nice about stuff.

Ok, so back to teaching....

I was a bit disturbed when I came across this vocab card while lesson planning.

Is this how how my students really see me?

:(     :(      :(    

I got a name card for my desk at school!

Some of my students at my Wednesday school performing there play for me.

I love this story!

Ok, that was a lot of random disconnected stuff.

I had some videos I wanted to put up, but they wouldn't load. I'll have to mess around with that later to see if I can figure it out better.