My first week here we had a scare of hand, foot, and mouth disease, but it turned out to be a false alarm. This week it seems like half the school has it…not a false alarm. But thankfully, one of those people isn’t me. Hooray, health! But because three of my little ones had it, the school closed down on Wednesday for the rest of the week. Kind of a bonus for me though because I finally got caught up on everything in my classroom.

What have I learned after 3 weeks of teaching 2 year olds?  First, two year olds are great. Second, I never want to have kids of my own. Third, TWO YEAR OLDS PUT EVERYTHING IN THEIR MOUTHS. and they have the attention spans of drunk goldfish.

But in general I’ve been loving it here. Not at all what I expected to be doing when I moved to Thailand to teach English, but since when does life ever go according to plan anyway?

My daily schedule goes something like this:

5:45ish-wake up
6:40-leave for work
7:30 officially start work (first 20 minutes usually spent eating breakfast and contemplating napping)
8:30-kindergarten morning assembly: raise the flag, morning meditation, “exercise” aka song and dance. most of this time is spent making sure the toddlers don’t run off
9:00-morning circle: sing some songs, practice greetings, colors, weather, feelings, etc
9:30-changes depending on the day. either i teach a session or we have PE, Thai class, Music class, or library
10:00-milk time. kids just drink milk. for some reason that’s a big thing in thailand. we also sing a song called milk, milk, we all like milk. even though i decidedly do not.
10:30-“teaching!” i plan a half hour lesson based on whatever the theme of the day is. usually it involves some sort of game or craft
11-lunch
11:30-prepare for naptime
12:00-GLORIOUS NAPTIME. go to sleep tiny minions
2:00-wake the babies up, have a snack, listen to nursery rhymes, etc
2:30-3:30-babies go home
4:30-caitlin goes home
5:00-caitlin contemplates pros and cons of falling asleep immediately vs eating dinner.
sometime between 9:00 and 1:00- go to sleep. consistency is somewhat lacking in my sleep schedule these days…

The work visa has proven to be an enormous pain in the butt. 6 months in Thailand and I’m still  technically here as a tourist. Visa and work permit are in the works but it will likely be a couple more months and require two more trips outside the country. Annoying, but once I get that I’ll be set for a long time, which will be nice.