El Paso on September 17

 Jesse is on leave for the next two weeks, and because of that, baby Kaitlynn doesn't have to go to daycare. We had a nice day with her here at home. I took her outside for awhile this morning. She enjoyed the fresh air and sunshine very much.

I was able to join Matthew in his classroom this morning for just a little while. His teacher, Ms. Villaneuva (except I'm not sure I am spelling her name correctly) runs a pretty tight ship for a second grade class of kids; but there are 18 children and many of them have challenging learning disabilities. I enjoyed being there with Matthew, seeing where he sits, and meeting his classmates.

I joined the children for their lunch times again today. Since there is no playground equipment anymore and there isn't much to do outside for recess, I brought a deck of cards along and we sat in the grass and played WAR. We attracted quite a crowd of children, who watched and cheered us on. They thought it was very funny when I lost the game!

 After school, we had to buckle right down and begin homework almost immediately. Emma got very lucky and didn't have any at all to do tonight, due to the fact that her teachers were in the middle of moving their classrooms around and were so distracted with the move, that they failed to assign any homework. Emma was very pleased on that score; but she is very anxious to know if she is one of the children who will have to switch classrooms and teachers. She would like to just stay in the class she is presently in. The picture of Emma above is of her taking a picture of her completed puzzle.

 Christopher did a good job on his homework tonight and had it all completed in 30 minutes. I checked over his work and only found two very small mistakes, which he gladly corrected and then let out a loud whoop that he was FREE to go and play ...

 Matthew had the most homework, and from what I could tell from his handouts, this will be a regular Monday through Thursday night ritual. We started right in on Matthew's homework at about 3:45 and didn't get all through until just about 5:30. That's a long time for a second grade child to have to sit and do school work, especially after they've been in school ALL day.

 Tonight, following story time, I flipped on my I-tunes and played some nice praise tunes. Christopher got right up and began a happy dance ...

 Emma followed Christopher in a split second ...

 And Matthew just totally cracked me up tonight. He was so full of JOY, dancing around the room to "Our God is an Awesome God" and "Every Move I Make."

We've been working on memorizing Ephesians 6.10 during our nightly story time. "Be strong in the Lord and in His mighty strength." And along with that, we've been talking a lot about David as a young shepherd boy, and how he trusted in God's strength to help him defeat Goliath. I even found a cute little LEGO video on Youtube that does the David and Goliath story rather creatively (it's very brief ... about a minute and a half). The children enjoyed seeing that tonight.

It was another good day, although more exhausting. All of us are feeling a bit under the weather with sore throats and runny noses. I noticed at school that about 50% of the children are sick there, as well as the teachers. Yuck. So I'm going to bed early tonight, hoping to wake up feeling better!