My weekend of thanksgiving celebrations is sadly over.  I had a ton of fun! I relaxed, sat by a fire, played settlers of catan, watched football, ate giant amounts of food, saw old friends, made new friends, had adorable children help me make jello, talked to my family over the webcam, slept in, watched movies, held babies, and overall had a fabulous time doing all of the above.

I have lots in my life to be thankful for.  This past week I had my students make a list of all the things they were thankful for in English.  They were creative, they even mentioned shoes and ultraman. 

Here are some of the things I am thankful for:

My H. father, salvation, My parents, My sister, Friends, family, a warm house, food, the Internet, blue sky days, rainy days, trees, mountains, horses, kids laughing, my teammates, bubble baths, freedom of expression, sitting by a fire, candles, books, days when I can communicate my needs in the local language, having multiple copies of the word of my own, love, peace, joy, other people's patience with me, kindness demonstrated in life, selfless people, the wisdom of people older than me, and the energy of people younger than me, love when I don't deserve it, music, a sense of humor, forgiveness...these are just the ones off the top of my head. 

There is much, much more I could praise the Father for, for what he has given me and what he has done in my life.  May we remember to be thankful as we enter into a time and a season where we celebrate His birth and the gift He gave us. 

A few photos from the weekend:

For the past week for some reason when I log into livespaces, my site is really oddly displayed and layed out weird...I'm not really sure why that is, so if it shows up wierd for you I"m sorry...I have no idea if it is a China thing or not. 

I feel very blessed to have the team that I do.  Really, they are wonderful and we have a great time together!  Every Monday night we have our team 'activity night'.  Last week was my turn and we went and got our hair washed at the local hair salon.  At this particular place my three teammates who are basically fluent in chinese pretend that they can't speak and then I have to be the one to use chinese.  It is good practice for me.  This week we played Dominos.  I had never really played dominos before I came to China.  Once or twice with my Grandmother, but not on a regular basis.  It is actually really fun.  The whole time we were laughing at various comments that were made.  The amount that I laughed really made me realize how little I have laughed like that without my mom and sister around.  My teammates have really filled that in for me, and I am going to really miss that next year, as two of them will be leaving.  Anyways, so if you haven't played dominos you are missing out...or maybe you just need to find the right people to play with. 

This past weekend we had our bi-annual middle school camp.  It was an awesome time!!!!  My girls grew a ton, which was so fun to experience with them and share some of the things the Father has done for me.  There is so much freedom in Him, it really is amazing.  Doing the drama workshop also went really well.  I had help this time too, which was such a blessing!  It would have been way too hard to manage 15 kids otherwise and give them direction when I can only be in one place at a time.  I don't know how directors do it all the time...it reinforced the thoughts that I don't really love directing, I would rather act.  However, I do like teaching about theatre and doing theatre exercises with kids.  The girls in my cabin were all kids from my organization, which was so fun, because I will be able to continue relationships with them when I travel to Thailand for our conferences.  We had some great heart to hearts, and it was nice to feel needed.

I just got my monthly issue of Martha Stewart Living magazine in the mail.  Now some of you may be saying, what are you crazy, buying that magazine??  But there is a huge part of me that loves to be able to do all her crafty stuff and make the world around me a beautiful place.  Some of what she does I realize is not necessarily realistic for one person to actually accomplish, but there are parts of me that really wants to.   I went to Ikea yesterday with a friend who was visiting me, and there are parts of me that would just love to go around and decorate for everyone and make their lives  homey.  I love making my house feel homey, that people would feel welcome and want to stay for long periods of time. 

Often I compare myself to other people, which is never a good trap to get into.  Some people are very minimalist and are able to live without much...I am not like this.  I want to be like this, but I will be realistic, I'm not really like this.  A part of my heart longs to move outside of Beijing to a city that is way less polluted, and way less crowded, and is much more beautiful.  With this, however, comes a lack of modern conveniences like butter.  Hard to bake things without butter. 

The reason I bring all of this up, is that during the flurry of Christmas decorating and holiday merrymaking, comes our organization's decision times for next year.  I am semi exempt from this due to the fact that this year the contract will be re-negotiated for our school and my team might get cut if the contract is not favorable...so that leaves me with the "where do I go, and what do I do" question.  As much as I try to put it off and not worry about it, it is still in the back of my mind because I have to put something down on my form.  Anyways.  So yeah...in the meantime I bake for my youth group girls, and not be like the  Martha from the New Testament who is worrying and not resting.   

I am completely exhausted from last weekend.  We had our Fall High school youth camp this past weekend, over 220 kids, our largest yet.  This time around the Father laid on my heart to lead a drama workshop during the workshop time that the kids have where they can choose different sessions to attend.  It ended up being really awesome, despite the fact that during the second session I had roughly thirty Korean kids who did not speak English attend who had no desire to actually DO any drama.   Now I just need to get enough rest so that I can do it all over again for middle school camp this coming weekend!

Me with Anna and Elizabeth, two girls from our youth group.

This weekend staff dressed like pirates for our "uncharted waters" theme.  There are no words for the wig, Daniel. 

This week I'm teaching the song "Do you know the Muffin Man" at the request of one of my co-teachers.  In any other culture this might go off without any problems.  However, in China when saying the word "muffin" it can tend to sound like Mafen (third and fourth tones) which means "horse dung".  Needless to say, you can probably imagine the large amount of giggling that resulted.  In no way, shape, or form is the "muffin man" anything like the "mafen" man.  A tricky song to teach...

Sometimes I think procrastination is something I have a hard time with.  Meaning that I like to procrastinate.  I'm trying to work on my grad school work, but sometimes it is difficult doing so because lets be honest, I don't really LOVE doing it.  I think I am a person who needs deadlines despite the stress they bring.  Otherwise, I can always think of a million other things to do.  One of which is writing on here. 

Today's unique comment on Chinese culture would be yesterday's ushering in of blanket season.  Do I mean huddling under a blanket since the heat is not yet turned on for a large portion of the country?  Actually, no.  I mean the practice of hanging a think, dark green  blanket in front of the door and leaving the actual door open.  I am yet undecided which I dislike more.  The obnoxious doors in our school that are impossible to open, or the large blanket that I must somehow duck aside/under while carrying my stuff on my way out.  Its a tough call. 

On a happy note one of my favorite former students is back and I'm really excited to see her.  Her parents just went through a rough custody battle, but PTL her mother won out, and now she is back at our school.  Though I would not wish boarding school on any kid, I would rather they be here than with parents that don't pay attention to them or only want them for status and child support payments.    

I'm a jellyfish

My student's name is Angel ironically, though I don't know what the bunny ears were about...

Here's my student Vanessa, who has on the wildest hat, Really she should have been Malificent from Sleeping Beauty.  I'll post the other photos in the album to the left.

Halloween was last Wednesday and oh my what a crazy day. Pretty much there was the craziness of last year with kids carrying around carved lit up pumpkins hanging from sticks, and crazy costumes, but this year the school decided to throw a dance party after the trick or treating...if I hear the song Barbie Girl by Aqua any time in the near future I think I might go crazy, they played it a lot.  One of the highlights of the night for me was the fact that my teammate Debbie dressed up as Darth Vader complete with the mask and working voice box.  She even borrowed a light up light saber from one of the kids who lives on our floor.  She is pretty short too, so overall it was just really funny.  My other teammate Helen dressed up as a waiguoren.  Which is essentially is a foreigner, but being that she is Asian American it was really funny cause nobody ever thinks she's from America, so she put on a blond wig and a shirt that said in Chinese, "Don't Hassle Me I'm a Local" 

Last week was Halloween.  A week ago right about now, I was in the middle of carving 18 pumpkins and my hands were killing me.  A number of children in one of my classes each brought in a pumpkin of various varieties (some I think were more gourds than pumpkins) and as a class we carved them last Monday afternoon.  I do not usually teach in the afternoons, but as it was a cultural experience for the kids, I made an exception.  And OH what an experience.  It was pretty delightful watching them dig out the pumpkin insides...the boys were pretty thrilled with how gross it was and most of the girls were like "EWWW."  Since most of them could only do so much, with the help of another teacher, I carved the tops, had them get most of the seeds out, and then I scraped and carved them after the kids had drawn a face on it.  Overall it was pretty cool.  By the end I was literally covered in pumpkin and extremely tired, but we had a lot of fun doing it.   

The following day with that class we painted masks together.  This was the first time I had tried to to painting with any of my classes...haha.  I don't know that we'll be doing painting anytime soon either :)  They did the painting part just fine, but the cleaning up part got a little crazy. Each bathroom has a long sink with probably eight faucets along it which the kids wash their hands at.  I had them also wash out their brush.  After rinsing the brushes, some kids got a little crazy when trying to dry out their brush and instead of setting it out to dry, they started flicking the water out on the floor.  Well of course the brushes weren't totally clean, and so really when I mean water, I mean paint.  Pretty soon the whole entire bathroom floor was covered in paint.  I didn't know how to stop them except to keep yelling no, no bu hao!!  Which didn't really work, and then the chinese teacher came in and really let them have it.  I think I need to learn how to scold in chinese.  The hard part is that I couldn't help laughing later because I thought "well, at least they had fun!" which is not usually thought of at our school.  Jackson Pollack would have been very proud of those kids :)