Tuesday, June 17, 2008

It's the little things that show big changes

Eating ants.

That's how a small thing showed me what a big change two years can make.

During my first week of teaching at the American International School of Freetown I did an activity with my kindergarten class where the gingerbread man that I had made escaped our classroom and we had to follow clues that led us all over the school in order to find out that he had really just come back to our classroom. During the course of our running around the school sugar ants came and attacked the gingerbread man. By the time we got back he was covered. I took one look at him and quickly covered him back up and doled out the extra ginger cookies I'd brought for my lunch. My aide looked at me funny when I suggested we throw out the ant covered cookies and proceeded to munch on the cookies, ants and all.

This afternoon I ordered a pepper chicken wrap from a local restaurant. It was mighty tasty, in addition to being all sorts of flaming hot, but I wasn't able to eat the whole thing in one sitting. My lunch was eaten on my classroom floor while reading a magazine and listening to my screaming children outside. I mistakingly left the second half of my wrap wrapped in tin foil on the ground while I went to take care of some other school related business (facebook, espn.com, checking out apartments in Portugal). An hour later I went to eat the rest of my wrap and found it crawling with sugar ants. And man did it taste good. No hesitation, hands tickling with ants, down it went. Mmmmm.

Thoughts: Time has the uncanny ability to fly or trudge always at the wrong moment; Diaspora is a better than and cheaper than meat from a can; Parent magazine says it's got everything a mom can want, yet I thought parenting was generally a two person job; two and a half days; I've changed my blog to Portugese instead of English so now it's time to "GUARDAR AGORA" then "PUBLICAR MENSAGEM"

2 comments:

Jessica said...

When will you be coming stateside? It'll be so good to see you!

I like the random thoughts at the end of your posts. I, too, might copy that.

And um.....eating ants? Don't know if I could do that.

Anonymous said...

hehe, talking about portuguese - where were you last night? missed a damn good match ;)