The Sachs Family: Emma's Day

I only recently began labeling my posts, mostly just because as far as blogging goes, I've simply learned as I've gone along, and one day at the beginning of this year it occurred to me that if I'm ever looking for something written a while back having the posts labeled might be helpful in finding them. Duh, right!? I'm nothing if not quick to catch on :-). Recently I was noticing that Alyssa and Rebekah have at least twice as many posts with their name in the label as Emma does. How is that possible? Emma is not at all the middle child who gets "squeezed out in the middle" (as Kevin Leman would refer to it) ~ trust me!

So while it wasn't necessarily set up this way on purpose, Emma had a very busy day today where my schedule seemed to revolve around being where she was, so I decided to blog about it. And I won't complain about chasing her from activity to activity because the day will come too quickly when I won't get invited to all these things, so for now I just enjoy that she wants me to be there!

Her class is taking three Thursdays in a row to visit the YMCA for swimming lessons/water safety. She begged me to come and swim with her class. I don't love to swim and I pretty much have to be over-heated bordering on the point of heat exhaustion for jumping in a pool to feel good. To top it off, when we arrived at the Y, it became apparent that I was one of only two parent chaperones that planned to swim. Several joined us for the field trip, but I guess everyone felt the same way about getting in the water as I did. Nothing like an audience to watch you do something you weren't looking forward to that much to begin with, but it was surprisingly fun! Especially the part where we got to throw life guard rescue floaties out to our partner in the pool, yell "Grab On!" and pull them to safety. And Emma was so happy, the chilly swim was more than worth it!

After swimming I had just enough time to grab a quick lunch then run to school for a RIF book distribution for Emma's class. With the Reading Is Fundamental program, the kids get to bring home a book donated by the PTA three times a year to encourage them to continue reading in their free time. RIF is one of my favorite school activities to help out with because I get to read to the kids and talk to them about why I enjoy reading and why it's important for them to keep up with reading for leisure. Best of all, I get to help them choose a book they want to take home, and most of them get very excited about it. It's fun.

We left school just a little early in order to make it to Emma and Rebekah's dentist appointments on time. Emma takes after her Daddy and was proud to have a perfect check up. Rebekah's appointment was a little traumatic. There's nothing wrong with her teeth, but after the experience she had with getting stitches in her mouth in February, it was no fun at all getting her to allow them to even just look in her mouth. A lot of crying went on.

I didn't take any pictures of Emma's swimtastic, super reader day, but here are some photos from her "no passport needed" field trip to China back in April that I should have posted long ago...

Emma's class studied a unit on China and she became a fountain of information on the country. She would often point to something I had in my hand and say, "Did you know that is made in China?" {lots of stuff is, honey} At the dinner table she would tell us, "Did you know in China it is very polite to slurp your noodles?"{cue huge slurping noises from all three girls}.

She was so excited to come home from school one day and tell me that her next field trip was to China. The kind of excited where she was practically packing bags and wondering if her panda bear pillow pet was Chinese enough to make the journey. When I suggested that this was possibly a "make believe" trip to China to supplement their classroom work she assured me that they were taking a very real trip to the very real China. She kept up this convincing argument for a good two weeks and even remained undeterred when I started asking all the hard questions like: Can I see the permission slip? How much will your plane ticket cost? When does Frau Srok expect you to turn in payment for this ticket? Should we be getting you a passport?

When her teacher broke the news to the kids that they were not actually going to China, there were a lot of sad kids. Emma was not the only child who had misunderstood. So in the very least her teacher learned that she has been teaching a very literal group of students this year who take her very seriously. In all seriousness, Frau Srok did a great job decorating the room for their visit to China and she planned activities that the kids loved! It was almost as good as the real China!

Ms. Josephine was there teaching the children how to use chopsticks.

There was an archeological dig where the kids found pieces of Chinese pottery, coins, and medallions. There was also Chinese character writing, a craft, and games like Chinese yoyo, but I was too busy gluing my fingers together with the dragon craft to take many photos.

The teacher had also set up a marketplace where the kids could use the classroom dollars they earned to buy Chinese {and American} trinkets. There was a hushed whisper moving throughout the class as Emma began to spend her money. I guess she had never spent any of her dollars all school year and she had over 150. Poor Frau Srok, Emma waited until all the other kids made their purchases before buying out the rest of her store.