ahhhhh. I’ve just finished my 4th 9 hour day this week. I picked up some ‘street meat’on the way home (lumps of mystery meat on a stick, covered in a red sauce that’s designed to help protect the secret identity of the meat in question.) good stuff.

This is also the start of NINE days off. One room mate is leaving for Japan at 3:30 tomorrow morning, and the other is heading to the Philippines a few hours after that. I cannot express how excited I am to have the house to myself.

Since this is the Lunar New Year holiday, I am preparing myself to face the “Year of the Monkey”. Lunar New Year is also the day that everyone in Korea eats a special soup to signify that they are one year older. Koreans don’t age on their birthday….they age at New Year. Based on Korean calculations, I’ll be turning 30 on Thursday. ugh.

One of my kids came to school dressed as Superman today. Cape and all. Another one tried to eat his scissors. What a day.

It’s SNOWING!!!!

Yes indeed. Big thick wet flakes that sting your eyes and stick to your shoes, and cover the ground! I’m pretty excited about looking out our living room wall tonight! (For those of you who don’t remember, our ‘wall’ is floor to ceiling, corner to corner sliding glass doors.) It gives a great view of flakes whizzing past the streetlights, and covering the hillside. It also reminds me of item #8 on my “Why I love Apartments” list…I don’t have to shovel it!!

For those of you suffering through a frigid Canadian winter, (Ha, Ha) this news probably isn’t exciting. However, this is the first snow that’s hit the ground here and I’m pretty thrilled. It’s really windy too, so I might even classify this as a mini-blizzard. sweet.

I was trying to explain the book “Baby Animals Learn” to my kindergarteners. I started by explaining that they used to be babies. (hard to do, when they don’t have any understanding of English in the past tense.) So, I counted down… “Beth, how old are you?” “6”. We all held up six fingers, and counted down to 1…when Beth was a baby. I repeated this a few times, and they started to catch on. Then, to fill them all with awe, I revealed that “Janice Teacher is TWENTY-EIGHT!!” (Insert squeals of laughter here). Then, we counted down many,many,many years until Janice Teacher was a baby. …. This is when little John (not to be confused with Robin Hood’s sidekick) understood completely, and got up and ‘lifted’ me up (or tried to) as though he was cradling an infant. From that point on, for the rest of the lesson, I was “Baby Teacher”.