There are so many things I want to blog about- the kids going back to school, Finn playing football, Katie and I doing a family triatholon on Labor day, teaching my neighbors how to speak Southern red-neck- I will have to post about that one, teaching children who speak 7 different languages- yes! SEVEN different languages are spoken in my kindergarten classroom. They are english, spanish, turkish, burmese, arabic, albanian and farsi. Luckily most of them can communicate fairly well except the girl who speaks burmese. She is the cutest little thing and any english she knows she has picked up from watching cartoons- at least that is what a translator told me. Her favorite thing to say is "Yep!". One the first day I took the kids on a tour of the school, which included a trip to the bathroom. I was in the girls' bathroom while the male school counselor was in the boys. After explaining how we behave in the bathroom- remember I teach kindergarten to a population where about half of the kids have never even been to school so I have to explicitly teach every school behavior- I asked the girls if they needed to go to the bathroom. Most of them said yes and went into a stall. My little burmese girl just stared at me. I looked at her and asked again if she needed to go to the bathroom. She smiled and said, "Yep!" and just kept staring at me without making a move. Its going to be a long year!
But I got side tracked- I wasn't planning on writing about my class. What I wanted to write about was a camping trip our family took about a month ago with our friends, the Murrays. We went up to Tanner Flats- which is only about 20 minutes away. We had a great time playing,
riding bikes,
exploring,
glowstick dancing by the camp fire
and we even got to watch the Tour of Utah bike race as it came up Little Cottonwood Canyon.
But I have to say the most entertaining part of the camping trip was Suzie and her one liners. She said some of the funniest things in relation to our trip.
We had packed our car to the gills with all our camping stuff. Eric remarked that is was like "The Grapes of Wrath." Neither I or the Murrays caught that literary reference but everyone nodded along until I called him out on it. In fact if you can figure it out what having a packed car has to do with "The Grapes of Wrath", I'll make you a treat!
Anyway the kids had stuff in their laps, on top of their heads and under their feet. We figured since we were only going 20 minutes up the road, they would be okay. After about 5 minutes Suzie remarked, "Now I know what my toys feel like in my toy box!"
Our campsite was next to a beautiful waterfall.
It was fun to watch and I personally thought was relaxing to listen to as we were going to sleep. But Suzie didn't think so because after laying in bed for about 20 minutes on the first night said, "Can someone turn the waterfall off?"
During the day we went on a hike and every time Suzie bent over to look at something or pick something up you could see her underwear.
I kept telling her to pull up her pants up so we couldn't see her underwear. She said, "It's okay mom. They're green...you know... for nature."
And her best observation of the weekend came at the end. We came home and found a very foul smell in our house. We were sniffing around- in the trash, in the fridge, in the sink, etc. to see what might be causing such a awful stench. After a few minutes Suzie lifted her arm and smelled her armpits and said, "I think it might be me. I smell bad."
Oh Suz... you keep us smiling!
