Church and Park

Kid update. Their favorite music lately is a new Disney DVD from Grandma Barb. Sam likes We are Siamese and a song about pirates, Eli likes Lion King, and Eva is officially into princesses now. She often wears her princess dress and the boys alternate between Darth Vader, various super heroes, and some legacy bug costumes (a beetle, bees). For reading, they do a mix of things. Sam and I had done Lorax for a while. We are now reading an illustrated Bible I have. It’s written for older kids, but he likes doing two or three little stories at a time.

Emily’s also got him working on English with a workbook I found here. I think one of our dilemmas will be whether 80% of grade level in local scool and 90% of grade level in English is okay. So far, he seems very happy with everything, so we are happy with it. However, if he ever feels like he’s left out we’ll figure out another way. He has a very good vocabulary and is interested in all different subjects. Today we watched a TV show and it had a little girl with an appendicitis in it. He seemed worried that this was something that could happen to him, so we spent a while discussing the body, organs, etc. The weather has turned warm sometimes recently also, so Emily has been taking them to the park. Sam has two friends there, one Spanish-Japanese and one Canadian-local, so he enjoys playing with them in English. Emily says the three boys are a little rough together but all like each other. They range from 4-6.

As I write this, I’m at church. Sam is in his class and Emily is leading her class. Sam’s re-accustomed to his class and likes it. They have a snack and drawing and a story as the 5 year old class. There’s also a time when they’re all together for singing and an activity. I just saw the mom of a kid that was born in the same month as Eva and Eli. Her oldest is finishing sixth grade and their plan is to move to Canada, I think so he can really do English hard. She was trying to figure out if it would be too hard for the daughter to readjust to local schools in five or six years. It really is a dilemma here. Two of our faculty members at my school have kids abroad. We also met someone who was born here but moved to the States at age 7. They adopted a son here and she just brought him back for several months so he could do preschool and work on language. It's interesting that so many people are working on the same challenge, but from a different direction. 

There are little things that are hard to figure out. Eli’s started throwing small tantrums. Today we couldn’t find a small batman helicopter for him as we left and he screamed for probably the first ten minutes of the drive. When he’s like this, it’s hard to know what to do with him. Punishment and bribes don’t really work. At home, sometimes I have to carry him and put him in time out and after a while he will calm down. He just seems to take the transitions a little harder. Come to think of it, I’m pretty sure Sam had a period that was similar, so I hope it’s just a phase. Generally speaking he does very well and seems to do well at school, but the tantrums will make us crazy.

We’re still trying to figure out this summer. The balance is how much time to get with two to four family locations and how planned versus how much freedom we want. My students graduate mid-June and there are real benefits in having grading and everything wrapped up before going home. Sam’s graduation is the 22^nd and it would be really nice to be able to take part if possible. We’ll see. Tomorrow we go to the denom office in downtown Taipei. I don’t know what else will happen, but that’s the basic plan.

Here are some pictures from the park today