Hibernation Update

It’s Thursday night and I’m exhausted from the day. I know I’ve been really slack on the blog lately, and I apologize to all my faithful readers. Honestly, it’s been very cold here, so we’ve been in a kind of form of hibernation. Weekends have been spent either lounging around in our apartment (when I write and David edits pictures/peruses photography forums) or going to church and hanging out with friends. Sadly neither of these activities is very adventurous/blog worthy.
School has been as mundane/crazy as ever. I spend so much time with my students that I’m getting to know all of them ridiculously well. This is both a good thing and a bad thing. I feel like I could write a twenty page paper on the psychology and the dynamics behind my kindergarten class. Lately there has been a very large amount of drama between my three girls. They are mean to each other, their friendships are conditional on behavior and Queen Bee has a new favorite every day. It reminds me of my own elementary school days. I remember the emotional rollercoaster that was girl drama. It’s all very unpleasant, yet interesting to watch it unfold before my eyes as an adult. I try talking to the girls and getting them to play nice with each other… but it’s pretty much a lost cause. One of the girls is uber-sensitive and takes any glance as an offense against her. There’s a girl drama related complaint at least every ten minutes of my day. The boys are fine. Sometimes I wish I just had a class full of boys like my co-teacher Helen.
An exciting thing happened in class today though. I was teaching from a Phonics book when one of my girls, Anna, starts screaming. I look over and her foot is somehow stuck through the tiny opening of the wooden chair she’s in. The open slat is so thin that she can’t get her foot out by herself. She starts screaming and crying hysterically while I run over and try to free her. She was freaking out too much for me to do anything, so I sent my other children to go find the Korean co-teachers. At this point pretty much the entire Korean staff pours into my classroom, including my two bosses, to find Anna screaming with her foot stuck in the chair. They managed to calm her down by speaking Korean and eventually they slid her foot out. It was quite an ordeal, but as my wonderful boy Inwang said, “We all worked together to solve the problem!!”
Lately my life has been school and writing. I’m working furiously on the rough draft of my second novel. It’s coming along quite well—I’m nearly done (as in maybe a month or two away from completion). I’m writing and submitting short stories to journals and contests in the meantime. David is working hard on his photography. We both really desire to pursue writing and photography as career paths and we’re working hard to make that happen.
In two weeks I’ll be home for Christmas!! I’m so ridiculously excited beyond belief. I’ve started a Christmas countdown in my classroom on my whiteboard. One thing that really sucks between now and then is that we have to work two Saturdays to make up for the days we missed school due to the swine flu. Sigh. Maybe working on the weekends will make time go by faster. (HA! NOT!). Oh well. Soon I’ll be back in America stuffing my face with Christmas cookies and cuddling with my dog. It will be a blissful and busy week for sure. I’ve been pretty homesick over the past month. I’m really excited to just get back and walk around Charleston. My home is such a beautiful city. I really took it for granted those 22 years I lived there—Korea has a charm of its own, but its nothing compared to Charleston’s mesmerizing spell. So if you’re reading this from Charleston, do me a favor and walk around the city for a while. Soak in the beauty. Don’t take it for granted.