Courtney's journals

Thurs July 1, 2004

Coming up in this entry: our cooking class and coffeehouse, much fun!

11:15pm

Again, late. Must sleep. Today:

• Went to the Kamin and got groceries and too much Japanese candy
• Ito-sensei drove us to the church to meet some of the daycare kids we'll be teaching over the summer (also discovered we'll be split up by age group for English classes, aagh! Jeri will have 6 year olds, I'll have 4-5, and Laurel and Maureen will have 2-3 year olds), ate lunch, played games with them, did our one planned Bible story skit (the Good Samaritin) - lots of fun :) they liked it so much they asked us to do a skit every week, eep!
• In successsion we: trucked back to the house, walked to the grocery store and then the foot onsen near our house, moseyed down by the river, stopped by Keiko-san's boutique, and made a weird lumpy "pinata" out of water balloons
• went back to the church to setup for cooking class and birthday themed coffeehouse (hung streamers everywhere and carefully arranged the tables and chairs - Ito-sensei loved it!) as people arrived they were like "sugoi!"
• Had the apple pie cooking class. Noriko translated the instructions in Japanese so everyone could copy them down. Everyone had a great time rolling our their half pies (we had so many people we had to halve the dough and God provided!)
• After pie class, started our Birthday coffeehouse event - sang songs, played the "who am I?" game (which EVERYONE figured out! they came up to us and told us the names on their backs) and the clothesbag game (every time one of them got the bag the others would go "ohhhhhhh!" and laugh - the big guy got it twice!) I fell off a chair during the clothes game (while starting/stopping the music) and the whole room stopped - I jumped up "I'm ok!" :S overall they all liked the games. Then Moe sang Amazing Grace and Laurel gave her testimony, and everyone came up and decorated the cake (they got way into it) and then we lit the candles, explained American birthday traditions, sang happy birthday to Moe, and ate the cake, which everyone loved (it was actually really good). then had coffee and tea and an overall good time.
• Then we cleaned up, came back to the house, had a team meeting and got some issues talked out and now here I am...

The kids today were way cool, they kept wanting us to spin them over and over again :)