​We started the robot project today! It went so much better than I was hoping for, and thank goodness for that because my expectations were incredibly low. We had the oldest kids (C4) in the morning, and it was nice to have a chance to figure out the best process and work through some of the kinks while having a more controlled and engaged class.

I didn’t take very many pictures because I was mostly running around and trying to help different kids with the assembly, but here’s one of the two that I managed to snap.

We decided that the best approach was to split the class in half and have one group working with us on the robots while the other group watched a robot-related movie (today’s pick: Wall-E). Things went extremely slowly in the morning, and we didn’t get nearly as far as I thought we would (shocking, I know. One of the hardest parts of teaching is managing your own expectations of what you’ll be able to complete in a day). We wanted to get all of the assembly finished for all of the kids in the class, but we only managed to do it for half of them. We’re going to need to alter our plans a little if we want to have a chance of finishing these things on time. Good thing we have those flex periods next week!
The process went a bit more smoothly with the younger kids (C3, Vanessa’s class of 7-9 year olds), and we were shocked by how well-behaved the kids were. Her class especially is at that age where they’re usually running all over the place and kind of out of control, but today they were waiting patiently for instructions and did an incredible job of listening!

How cool does this look? There’s something about electronics and wires that makes anything look impressive. As soon as you have some wires in front of you, it looks like you mean business.

I think that a big part of the reason for the good behavior is that all of the kids are super excited about this project. When we showed them the demo of our robot, they all got wide-eyed and were clearly pumped about the fact that they were going to make the same thing. Even the kids who act like they’re too cool for school were getting excited. Hopefully this good behavior lasts the entire time that it takes to make the robots because this isn’t exactly a quick process, and having a bunch of kids running around and screaming would make it about a million times more painful. All in all, I’m very happy about how things went, and I can’t wait to see how the robots turn out!
In other news, I’m falling asleep at the computer again, so please excuse me if anything I wrote makes zero sense because it probably happened when I was asleep. I think I caught all of them, but my brain isn’t functioning quite well enough to go back through and process everything. I need to see if I can find time to hibernate this weekend.

​This weekend has been completely packed. I didn’t get a chance to write yesterday because it was crazy from morning to night… we didn’t get home until after 11PM! I, of course, was a total mess and couldn’t keep my eyes open, so I decided it was better to just go to sleep rather than attempt to write something (that inevitably would have been incoherent).

Punta Negra

Yesterday was the team’s last day, aka my last day of coffee duty! I rolled out of bed just in time to get the coffee started at 6AM, took a quick shower, ran back to the kitchen to make breakfast, etc. etc. etc. until after worship when I took a 45 minute nap because I knew there was no chance of me making it through the day without one.

The team was ready to go around 11:30AM, and that’s when our adventure started. Most (if not all) of the flights to the US from Lima leave in the middle of the night, so we had the entire day to spend sightseeing in the city. Our first stop was for lunch, at a hotel in Punta Negra where Jim and Tony used to live before the EA buildings were complete enough to move in. Tony ordered a bunch of different dishes so that people could try a few things. I had some arroz chaufa (basically fried rice), lomo saltado (beef stir fry), sweet potato slices (potatoes are very popular here), and a piece of corn tamale (ground up corn and some other things all mushed into a rectangle). The sweet potatoes and tamale weren’t my favorite things… The potatoes had a confusing bitter taste to them, and the tamale wasn’t my favorite texture. It was nice to have a chance to try some different things without committing to a whole plate though!

Plaza San Martín. The statue is of José de San Martín, Peru’s liberator.

The beach at the hotel was also nice. There’s no beach access without going through one of the hotels/restaurants in the strip, so that makes it into a kind of private beach. It wasn’t very crowded there, partly because of the “private-ish beach” thing, and partly because the waves are huge which makes it a less desirable location for people who want to go in the water. I had no interest in touching the sand or the water though, so I was happy to have less people and get to see the big waves (from afar).
The Palace of Justice, home of Peru’s supreme court.

The rest of the day was filled with sightseeing! We drove into central Lima, checked out some of the historic stuff I saw a couple weeks ago (though all access to the plaza was blocked, so we didn’t get to go back there to see the President’s house, etc), and then drove up the coast to an overlook where you can see the city. The coast is awesome because there are these huge cliffs between the city and the beaches. They’re probably a pain to walk up and down and to deal with (and they’re all covered in netting because I’m sure they have rock slides all the time), but they’re definitely beautiful.

Debbie, Julie, and me at the overlook

The overlook was one of my favorite parts of the day because I don’t think I fully appreciated the size of Lima before seeing it from that vantage point. When I say that the city stretched as far as the eye can see, I am not exaggerating. In every direction, the buildings just looked like they continued on forever. There’s also a massive statue of Jesus at the top (Cristo del Pacifico), and you can see him standing on top of that mountain from miles and miles away.
Buildings everywhere. If I had turned my camera to the right, you would see more of the same type of congestion.

The last part of the day before dinner and heading to the airport was a stop at the Inca Market, an artisan market that’s great for souvenirs. We split into groups, and I enjoyed walking around, seeing everything that the stores had to offer, and practicing my Spanish. A lot of people spoke enough English to say prices and such, but they were definitely happy when they realized that they could speak Spanish to us instead! And I even spoke a little! And no one looked at me like I was speaking gibberish! Maybe they were just being polite, but we’re going to go with “I nailed it” instead.
Lima on one side of the mountain, and this on the other side.

Dinner, the drive to the airport, and the drive back to EA after the airport were completely exhausting. I was falling asleep in the van all the way home. I even started doing that thing where someone talks to you and you can understand them, but when you go to answer, you’re way too tired to put words together so it just sounds like gobbledygook. Needless to say, the discoteca is going to have to try harder if it wants to keep me awake because I’ve been having some exhausting Saturdays recently!
How cool is that sunset?!?!

Today was one of those days where you have a lot to do, make a to do list, work on things all day, and realize that you actually completed zero of the things on your list, despite the fact that you were running around all day. I don’t even know how I filled the hours today, but I blinked, and the day was close to over. I spent a decent amount of time doing laundry, cleaning my room, and moving from the room I’m in right now into Debbie’s room because Kait, the last missionary, is coming back this week, and I was in her room.
Okay, I should get to bed now… Tomorrow is bound to be another hectic, nonstop kind of day, and Debbie and I have to start our robot lessons in the morning. I’m keeping my fingers crossed…

​You’ll never guess what happened today… we finished wrapping all of the notebooks!!! I seriously thought there was no chance of us finishing before the end of the week, and I’m still not completely sure about how it happened. The total notebook count is 266, and maybe about 50% of those are double wrapped (paper then plastic)… that means that we wrapped notebooks about 399 times over the last 5 days! That’s crazy.

So many notebooks, all fabulously wrapped

The wrapping process was down to a science today. All week, I’ve been tweaking things and working to make them more efficient. Today, we were on a roll. All of the notebooks were already sorted, the labels written, the papers and plastic pieces cut, so the only thing that anyone had to do was wrap! The less thinking required, the better.
By the end, some of the kids were helping, Julie helped me finish up the last few, and I was refusing to stop until they were all done. Those things put together are what made the final stretch possible. 

Tonight is a night for celebration! So I’ll be going to bed… Oh to sleep 15 hours, uninterrupted. That would be the ultimate dream right now.

The team’s last day is tomorrow, so we have an action-packed day in Lima ahead of us. As happy as I’ll be to not have to make 6AM coffee anymore, it will be sad not having them around. It’s been nice having some fresh faces around.

Okay… I’m starting to type gibberish. That means it’s time to sleep. Chau!

​**This is from yesterday, but I literally fell asleep writing it.

THE ROBOT WORKS!!! This is BEYOND exciting news!! To sum it up really quickly, Tony got the idea that Debbie and I should teach a robotics class, and we gave in slightly and agreed to do one robot project in our class. We found an instructable online that doesn’t require any programming (because that makes things WAY more complicated) and decided that was going to be our project. We brought the motors, wires, switches, and battery holders from the States, figuring that the rest of the parts would be easy to find in Peru.

Meet Buzz the Bot!

That was a bit of a mistake… We have managed to find the essential parts and pieces, but it certainly hasn’t been easy. We eventually tracked down a soldering iron, flux, and solder, but then we found out that the solder was too thick. Debbie bought some thinner solder this morning, and that has made all the difference. We also bought sheet metal here, which they didn’t have at the two big hardware stores we shop at, so instead we were directed all over Chilca to this construction supply warehouse where we bought a piece of sheet metal that is at least 20 times bigger than what we need.
Anyway, everything finally came together today, and we finished assembling our robot! We were having soldering issues which were quickly resolved after buying thinner solder. Now it works!! And thank goodness for that because I wouldn’t know what to do to troubleshoot if it hadn’t. The basic description of the robot is that it goes straight, and when it runs into something, it turns itself and keeps going. AND OURS ACTUALLY DOES THAT!! (You can watch a video of it on my Instagram @larakaiserian… If you’re on a computer, there’s a link on the right sidebar. The internet is too slow to directly upload it here.) Debbie and I are ecstatic, even though we still have some logistics to figure out, because we didn’t have a backup plan. No problem though because it worked!!

Shopping in Chilca

The rest of the day was pretty cool too. This morning, the team went into Chilca, got split up into groups of two or three, and had a shopping list of items that they needed to find. All of the Spanish speakers (myself included actually) were assigned to groups and told not to intervene unless someone was in desperate need of assistance. It’s a valuable exercise because it helps to give the group an idea of what it’s like to be in a situation where you’re completely out of your element and trying to figure things out without speaking the language. It definitely required some creativity (and charades skills) and confidence to go up to people and sound like an idiot while trying to find your things. If anything, the whole exercise made me realize that I know a lot more Spanish than I thought. I would have easily been able to ask shopkeepers about the things on our list. The groups all did well, and I was impressed with how willing they were to just go for it.

Tonight’s sunset

The afternoon was filled with more vinifan-ing notebooks. I’m getting good at it and have my pace down to a science. In about four hours this afternoon, I wrapped 15 notebooks that needed paper and plastic coverings and 10 that only needed plastic. That means, I did 40 wraps in 4 hours, 10 wraps each hour, or 1 wrap every 6 minutes. I had previously estimated my pace at 5 minutes per wrap, and I think that might still be correct because I probably spent about 10 minutes per hour doing other things like helping people, organizing notebooks, cutting paper and plastic in bulk for everyone to use, etc. Exciting because I now know my exact pace… discouraging because at that rate, it would take me close to one eternity to finish all of the notebooks… hopeful because the team is still here, and anything they get done is less for me to do. In conclusion, sometimes it might be better to know less.

​Today was so much fun!!! We went on a field trip with the team and ALL of the kids. The morning was the usual: make coffee at 6AM (my least favorite thing to do), run back to my room and pray/read my Bible for about half an hour before I have to get ready and run to the kitchen again to make breakfast for the team (I’m a professional bulk scrambled eggs maker now), eat, and go to worship with the team and the other missionary staff. After that, the day’s adventure started!

Beach organized chaos

We loaded the 50 kids plus the 20 or so teachers, team members, helpers, etc. onto a coach bus, along with games and toys and food and water, and made our way to the beach. That wasn’t the ultimate destination, but we pulled off the highway for a quick pit stop. I thought it was pretty brave of the teachers to plan a “quick stop” at the beach with all of those kids.

The beaches are all so pretty!

Somehow, we got everyone off the bus and down to the ocean where they splashed around for about half an hour before we rounded everyone up again and went back to the bus. Also, when I say “we”, realistically, I played a very small part in making everything happen. My biggest beach duty was making sure no kids drowned, a task made much easier by the fact that none of them went in past their knees.

The pool

The main stop of the day was a pool at this hotel/resort type place in Mirasur. It’s about half an hour south of where we live in Chilca. Once again, my job was to come out of lifeguard retirement and make sure all of the kids stayed safe. I was nervous at the beginning, especially because that’s when kids are a little more rowdy. I had to grab a couple of kids throughout the day and pull them up, but they might have been okay without me. I just wasn’t willing to take any chances, so if anyone looked like they were even struggling, I didn’t give them a chance to keep going on their own.

Me in a gazebo at the top of a mountain

Once things settled down, I had a lot of fun! I swam around with a few kids, helped them with their swimming, attempted to teach Eddy’s daughter how to swim (and speak English… we’re determined to make her grow up bilingual), and got a chance to hang out and spend time with the kids while finally feeling like I was in my element. Time flew by, and before I knew it, it was time for lunch. We kicked the kids out of the pool, changed, and ate.

Isn’t this awesome??

We had about an hour and a half to go before we needed to head back to Esperanza de Ana, so everyone played in the hotel’s big grass field with frisbees, volleyballs, pool noodles, soccer balls, and some inflatables. I mostly spent my time having a frisbee catch with one of the kids, and by the time we had to leave, I was totally exhausted.

Some well-irrigated fields in the middle of the desert

The bummer of the day was that our soldering practice went horribly. We’re trying to get ready for our robot project with the kids, and we’re struggling. One of the guys on the team knows some things about soldering, so we asked for his help. He said that he thinks we have the wrong type of solder because it wasn’t melting as easily as it should. Part of me is feeling like, “Hooray! Maybe we’re not the problem!” and the other part of me is grumbling about the fact that they didn’t give us the right stuff at the store. It’s fine though! Everything will get figured out.

For now, I need to go to sleep before I fall asleep at my computer again… anddd too late… I just did. Okay! But I’m up again and will go to bed as soon as I get this posted.

​The last two days have been one, big, notebook-wrapping blur. The team has been working on their service projects, and I’m in charge of the “vinifan” project. Let me attempt to summarize the ridiculousness that is this process:

The notebooks closer to the bookcase are already wrapped. The other ones need to be wrapped. A million notebooks everywhere.

The kids need notebooks for school, and it’s way more than you would ever think that someone might need. A 2-year-old needs 2 notebooks. A 4th grader needs 13. A 7th grader needs 17. What the heck are they doing with 17 notebooks?? Well, that’s beside the point. Each notebook is for a specific subject (geometry, arithmetic, algebra, etc. – even though those are all math, they all need a different notebook). There are a bunch of different line types in the notebooks – graph paper, blank, lined, 3-lines, bigger squares, even bigger squares, bigger 3-lines, etc., and each subject needs a specific type of lines and a specific color. Each notebook also has to get covered with plastic (vinifan is the brand of the plastic) to protect it. If the notebook itself isn’t the right color to begin with, you need to first cover it with paper that’s the right color and second cover it with the plastic. They also all have handwritten labels that have the subject, kid’s name, grade, and school written on them. I think that we have about 24 kids that we are wrapping for, and they range in age from 2 years to 8th grade.

Sunset!

Does that sound like a very complicated situation for some school notebooks? The correct answer to this question is “yes”, by the way. We figured out a system yesterday, after a little trial and error, and it ended up with me writing all of the labels, picking out notebooks, and leaving a note if their colors needed to be changed. I had volunteers assigned to me from the team, so at least I wasn’t doing it alone. By the end of the day yesterday, I think we had only done about 60, and we have over 200 to do.

The last two days have basically just been hours and hours of wrapping books in plastic. Actually, I spent most of my time writing labels. It was a fabulous moment when I finished writing and my hand could finally relax.

The team sang a couple of songs at church tonight!

Tonight, after dinner we went to the church where the kids are taken during the school year. The music was really fun and upbeat, and I knew some of the songs in English. The sermon was also really well done. Dina was translating it, so it wasn’t that hard to follow, but I tried to translate the Spanish and then only count on her for help when I definitely couldn’t figure out what was going on. I’m going to put my comprehension level of that service at about 85-90%. I’m definitely improving!!

I’m exhausted and have to wake up at 5:45AM again to put the coffee on before breakfast, so ciao for now!

Secret beach! El Boquerón. I love the view of the buildings in the background.

Despite losing a Sunday of personal time because of the team’s arrival, today was a great day! Since the team is here, there’s a whole plan of things to do and see to give them a picture of Peru and its culture. They’re all things that I haven’t done yet either, so I’m totally fine with being responsible for a couple more things over the next few days if that means I get to do all of this stuff with them!

Here’s a view looking towards the direction of the ocean. You can’t see through the tunnel from this angle, but it’s a little bit out of frame to the right.

My responsibilities over the next week include making breakfast each day (putting out cereal and milk, making coffee, cutting bread, and scrambling an incredible number of eggs), so I headed to the kitchen around 8:15 to get it ready for 9AM. I can now say that I have scrambled 35 eggs at once! Life skills, right? After breakfast, we had a little community worship where Jim and Tony talked about how they ended up here and Jim gave a mini-sermon. Then, Debbie walked everyone around the property and explained what the ministry does (which yes, I know I still have to write a post about more of the details of that… I’ll do it soon! It’s good that I waited though because I’m still learning more and more about how things work every day).
The coolest part of the day was going into Pucusana for lunch! Pucusana is a fishing village that’s only about a 10 minute drive (if that) from where we live. We had lunch at a restaurant right next to this place where there’s a tunnel through a hill that lets ocean water pass into a little beach area. I liked watching the waves come out of the tunnel, wash over the rocks, and fill the pool that creates what feels like a secret beach (besides the fact that it’s clearly not a secret, but that’s a minor detail).

The cancha (to the left) and lomo saltado (to the right)

For lunch, I had lomo saltado. It’s another typical Peruvian dish and is a beef stir fry served with rice and french fries. The stir fry included beef, onions, tomatoes, and maybe some kind of pepper? I’m not the best at identifying foods, but I think that’s right. They also put out cancha as an appetizer. It’s a popular snack food here and is supposedly similar to corn nuts, but I can’t confirm because I don’t think I’ve ever had corn nuts. It’s definitely not exactly the same though because the corn here is different from the corn at home. It’s called “maiz chulpe” and has massive kernels… like nickel sized probably. The texture of cancha is baffling to me (my mouth can’t figure it out), but I think Debbie nailed it today when she said it’s like inside out popcorn. For the seasoning, I think it usually just is cooked in oil and has salt on it.
Debbie, me, and Julie pre-boat ride

Our post-lunch activity was a boat ride around Pucusana Island. There’s not much happening on the island, people-wise, but there are a bunch of animals hanging out there. We saw sea lions, penguins (!!!), starfish, some birds that I should remember but don’t, and a few other things. We also saw a lot of yachts and rich person vacation houses. There was one that had part of the house next to the bottom of a cliff, another part at the top of the cliff, and an elevator connecting the two. There are also a few beaches which were completely packed. I’m really glad that I got to go on the boat ride. It was interesting getting to see everything from the water!

Sea lions napping in the sun

How cool!!!
On the right side, you can see the house I was talking about with the elevator!
More houses in the hills.
This person has some serious landscaping… A speck of green in a sea of brown, brown, brown. It looks like it got plucked out of somewhere else and plopped down here.
Boat gas station!

When we got back, I spent some time attempting to build a practice robot for our class (let’s just say it’s still a work in progress) before Julie and I had to get dinner ready. We made pasta salad for the team, and I was totally lost. “Pasta salad” isn’t even in my vocabulary. Why would you take the perfection that is pasta and sully its reputation by associating it with something like salad?? Sorry, side rant. Anyway, like I said, pasta salad = not really my thing, but I think it turned out fine (thanks to Julie and her exceptional dicing skills). At least all I have to make for the rest of the week is more scrambled eggs! That’s something I can handle.

The view from my beach chair

The mission team arrives tonight, and they’re going to be here for the next week. Since we’re going to be running around the entire time they’re here, Debbie decided that we should have a “mandatory fun” trip to the beach. I needed some convincing, mostly because I can’t stand sand, but she promised that I would have a chair to sit on (since I refuse to lay on a towel… too close to the sand). I was a little skeptical, but we ended up having a really nice morning. We mostly just sat, read, and got sunburns (yes, we did put sunscreen on… no, we didn’t reapply). The beaches around us are beautiful. They all have big rocks and cliffs and millions of little crabs with those stick up eyes that you see on crabs in cartoons.

Giant flower pot in your parking spot? No problem, just park next to it. No matter if you’re half in the street because everyone else is too.

On the way home, we went on a big quest/adventure to find sheet metal for the robots we’re going to make in class. Eventually, we found our way to a construction material warehouse. We only needed a small piece of sheet metal, about 20”x10”, but of course they only sold it in sheets that are something like 4’x8’. Sooo now we have a little extra sheet metal and zero ideas about what to do with it.

More beach awesomeness

When we got back to Esperanza de Ana, it was supposed to be time to take showers and get back to work. I had some trouble motiving myself, killed a lot of time before my shower, and ended up being ready to do work around 4:30. Our big task of the day was to build a sample robot for our class, and I completely failed… not because I messed it up but because I didn’t actually build anything. I didn’t know where all of the materials were, and Debbie was in a meeting so I didn’t want to bother her. Yes, I’m making excuses because if I had actually stuck to the schedule, Debbie would have been able to help me. Instead, I just gathered together the materials I could find, and spent most of the rest of my time until dinner reading about Spanish verbs.
But really… How cool is that?

Now, my eyes are fighting to stay open (I’m starting to feel like I should be getting to bed much earlier each night…) even with the ridiculous club music that the house 2 properties down is blasting. This is great though. If I keep having exhausting Saturdays, I’ll never have any trouble falling asleep through this ruckus. A very small silver lining…

​Okay this is going to be another quick one because I am super tired. If I don’t fall asleep while writing, we’re going to call that a win. At this point, it’s not feeling promising.

Our classroom, so nice and serene before the kid tornado came through

I’m going to echo what I said yesterday because it’s been another one of those days where time just flies by. When I think about the morning and what else I did today, it feels like it was decades ago. So we have the longest days and the shortest days all at the same time.

Classroom chaos. We don’t have nearly enough space for working and storing all of this stuff.

We only had one class again today because we cancelled with Vanessa’s kids for the afternoon. We had Ingrid’s C4 class in the morning, and this was their first day working on their models. To make things a little harder for these kids, since they’re the oldest, we had them draw a plan of their building as well. It was good because it got them really thinking about what the function of the building is, what spaces it needs to fill that function, and try to lay things out in a way that makes sense.

We had an earthquake drill during the day, and all of the kids had to go outside and stand in the “S” circles (the seismic safe zones that buildings here are required to have.. they also have to have the circles physically drawn on the ground with a big “S” inside which often looks a little tacky, especially in the historic part of the city)

After lunch, I went into model building mode. That’s my happy place. Modeling was my favorite thing to do in school, and I was devastated when I realized that my physical modeling skills would be practically never used again. Let me tell you, it’s heartbreaking when you realize that your favorite part of school is not useful in the real world. This is only kind of the real world, so hooray! My skills were put to good use! I made an example building to help the kids get a sense of what we’re expecting form them. My model isn’t perfect (because I forced myself to move more quickly than I would have if I was going for perfection), but I’m happy about how it turned out! And it only took me way longer that it should have to get it done.

My castle, xxx hours later. Made from all recycled materials- a cereal box, the box from a tea kettle, a box from a light, and a whole pile of paper scraps.

The rest of the day was a blur. I finished my model, helped Julie get beds ready for the team that’s coming tomorrow night, learned about how Vanessa has been cataloging the library books so that I can teach the team how to do it next week, learned how to “vinifan” (the brand that they use to cover the kids’ notebooks with plastic to help protect them), and who even knows what else.  By the time I stopped moving and ate dinner, it was 8:30PM.

At this rate, it’s only a matter of time until I get sick. Fingers crossed my immune system doesn’t fail me. There’s no time to be sick right now!

​Time moves incredibly quickly here. I wake up, I blink, and it’s time for bed. That’s a good thing though, right? That means I’m keeping busy at least. Ha… as if that’s something I was worried about. The fact that I go to bed every night with a list of things to do the next day is enough to prove to myself that I have plenty to do. No complaints about that though! It’s nice to feel useful.

This isn’t a great picture (because I took it from the parking garage so there wasn’t much choice), but you can see enough. I love how they build houses and buildings all over the hills and mountains here. It looks super cool! I don’t completely understand how you get anything to your house, but that’s beside the point.

I didn’t write yesterday because I was exhausted, and nothing very exciting happened. Debbie and I went shopping to get food and supplies for the team that’s coming this weekend. Six hours and 230 eggs later, we were back at Esperanza de Ana, nearly ready to collapse… and then we had to prep for class today. So yeah, needless to say, I didn’t really feel like staying up even later to write something.

Origami time!

I’m falling into a nice pattern of life. I love routine, and that part of me is thriving here. I wake up around 6:30AM, and by 9AM, I’ve already: either gone for a run (MWF) or just vegetated in bed for a little, spent time reading my Bible/reflecting/praying, eaten breakfast, and gotten ready for the day. From 9-9:30AM, we have community worship (me and the missionary staff – Tony, Jim, Debbie, and Julie), and after that, the day is nonstop.

Starting to work on their models.

Debbie and I usually have some prep work to do from 9:30-11AM, class from 11AM-1PM, I help with lunch at 12:30PM, lunch is from 1-1:30PM, prep again from 1:30-2PM, class again from 2-4PM, pull myself together from 4-6PM (more prep/other things I need to get done), dinner from 6-7:30PM, and then maybe work a little more/practice my Spanish (I have a lot of children’s books in my room right now)/journal/blog. And then I go to sleep for what feels like 10 seconds, wake up, and do it again.

Last night we had to cut some foam board for class today. It reminded me of late nights in studio in college. It’s a little funny that Debbie and I can totally relate because our experiences were so similar, but our majors had such a rivalry in school.

Today we thankfully only had a morning class, C3 with Vanessa. The kids are starting their first big project, making a “kid city”. We started off the class with some origami to get the kids thinking in 3D. We weren’t sure how it would go, especially since this class can get a little out of control, but the kids were into it! They got so excited when we finished and they all had little foxes that they used to nibble on each other’s ears.

After that, we transitioned back into talking about cities. We listed out some building types again and had the kids draw numbers to find out what building type they had. In an attempt to spark some creativity, we pulled together a few of our favorite/wacky buildings to show to the class. We don’t want them all making buildings shaped like boxes, but for some of them, that’s the only kind of building they’ve seen. It will be interesting to see what we end up with!