Falling in love with 19 first graders

This is our classroom on Tuesday before 19 little first graders came the next day. On Wednesday all the kids were so excited to be back at school and to see their friends again! It was exciting, although I must admit I was pretty nervous. Thankfully the day went pretty smoothly and the kids enjoyed all we had planned and we were done at lunch time. By Friday, I had fallen in love with our little kiddos. They are so cute and they really just want to please and most of them love school and learning, everyday is exciting for them. Also by Friday I was whipped out, even though we only had half days in first grade this week I was tired. Hopefully my body will get used to this new schedule soon!

On Friday I also met the second graders. I am going to be their PE teacher for half of the year. At CAJ this year they have some teachers that have to be in the states until Christmas, so they are shuffling duties around quite a bit. So, my job is actually not just first grade. I will be in the first grade classroom in the mornings, but then in the afternoons I will teach first and second grade PE and after school I will be coaching. Right now I am coaching a middle school volleyball team. I have 9 girls on the team, mostly 7th graders, but some 8th graders too. This week was tryouts, so on Tuesday we have our first practice as a team. I have never coached before, so I am pretty nervous, but I have gotten a lot of encouragement. I also found out that since there are 3 middle school teams and only 2 courts, my team will be sharing one court with another team, which will be good because I get to work with their coach to plan practices since we will be doing a lot of it together. But, please be praying for us as we start practice this week!

On Saturday I had the opportunity to go to a temple sale in Kawagoe, which is about half an hour away. At the sale their were people selling used goods, kimonos, old tools, antiques and plenty of other random things! It was very interesting, but also extremely hot. All of us that went were pretty sweaty just after an hour of walking around there. After that we went on a mini tour of Kawagoe, which is also called little Edo. A lot of the buildings there are very traditional looking from the Edo period. It was pretty neat to walk around, but one of my favorite parts was candy street. The street is actually called candy street and there are shops and vendors who make traditional Japanese candy, which is really neat! Like the anpanman candy in the picture to the left. The vendor hand crafted it out of sugar. We also got to try some sweet potato ice cream, it was pretty good. Not my favorite ice cream, but for being purple it wasn't bad :)

This week I didn't feel quite so lonely. I had a great time on the trip to Kawagoe on Saturday and it has been nice to start school and spend more time there with people around. I still don't really like living alone, but I do enjoy my alone time more now that I spend more time during the day with people. It will be interesting to see how things go this coming week with our first graders starting to have full days of school for the first time. I hope that soon we can get into a routine and things will be more stable and settled, but for now I am trying to enjoy the ride and trust that God is in control.