the very hungry caterpillar

"Hurry, emma and samantha, come quick!" came the call from the kitchen.

We all rushed into the kitchen where our house helper was preparing lunch for that day. The girls squealed a squeal that only a girl can manage and we watched, transfixed, as a huge caterpillar crawled out of the broccoli home he had been inhabiting recently.

The girls got up on stools and intently watched him crawl around, his furry body inching ever so slowly away from their curious eyes. I'm not sure whose idea it was, but when the green bean sword made its appearance, the fun grew exponentially. Caterpillar was poked and prodded from all sides, nothing like the carefree life of the caterpillar in Mr. Carle's book.



Finally, caterpillar rolled over in defeat on the green spinach leaf examination table and pretended to be dead to avoid further prodding. Or maybe he was dead. We're not quite sure.

the moms must be crazy!

With june and july being the peak months for hand-foot-and mouth disease, emma has still not returned to preschool yet this summer. But we've tried to find ways to keep the days fun and full of opportunites to see friends. Our weekly schedule usually includes one day with Clara Anne and Chloe, one day with Peter, Alex and Savannah, one day with a picnic lunch and one day of running errands by bus - to the post office, grocery store, the market, etc. The girls love riding the bus, everything from swiping the bus pass and the "ding" it makes as it takes our money to holding on the hand rails to making friends with the driver.

But nothing beats playdates, whether it's playing baby dolls with the girls or learning the specifics of making train tracks with the boys. Several weeks ago when clara anne and chloe were here, I thought I'd try one of the activities I'd been putting off for a while - body paint.

I mixed some powdered tempera paint with johnson's baby soap, took most of their clothes off and stuck them all in the bathtub. The result was a bathroom full of nonstop shrieking, the fullness of three-year-old delight. My own face hurt by the time it was over because I was smiling so much at their enjoyment.

Paint gets squishy in your fingers...and feels great...

It's so much fun to laugh with friends...

Chloe has had enough (mantha didn't want anything to do with it from the start!)...

dirty hands, dirty feet, happy girls!

The beauty of it - I mean, aside from the obvious joy - was that at the end of this grand party, I cleaned the girls off, walked out of the bathroom and shut off the light...knowing that it would all be magically cleaned by my house helper this afternoon. Why go to preschool when you can do this!

in pursuit of golden perfection

Golden perfection, what could that possibly be? A nice, big hunk of cheese...breaded and deep fried to a golden brown...served with your choice of dipping sauce...yep, fried cheese sticks. This is my newest aspiration. Perhaps you can blame it on our recent addition to Top Chef reality cooking show, perhaps there are just things I want to try to make, but either way, as time goes on I find that I am more and more brave in testing out my culinary skills. If fried cheese can be called a culinary skill, that is. [I do realize that I have at least one friend to whom this entire post may seem revolting. So, for bp of ky, you may want to stop reading here! :) ]

So if you are a fellow fried cheese stick lover, here's how I did it, if you're interested in trying it. (Especially since UBC Coffee or any other accessible asian restaurant does not offer this on their menu!)

Cut your choice of cheese into nice thick sticks, about the size of string cheese that you'd buy in the States. Since I was trying this for the first time, I used mozzerella, cheddar, hot pepper jack, and swiss. I figured I'd just go for broke and see what happened.

Next, I made peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for lunch and took the crusts off of four sandwiches. This was not specialty bread, this was plain, no-frills, asianese supermarket white bread. I pulverized it in my blender just a few seconds and poured it into a big bowl.

I added italian seasoning, garlic powder, salt and a few dashes of pepper until it looked and smelled like coating I've seen on fried cheese before. (Sorry I can't offer anything more specific than that!) At this point, I was already in fried cheese heaven. It smelled so good.

Next, I combined 1/3 cup flour and 1/3 cup cornstarch in another bowl.

In a third bowl, I poured maybe 1/2 cup of milk. [i think egg would actually have been better to use, but samantha is allergic to egg and I didn't want to leave her out of such a scrumptious meal!]

I poured cooking oil into my wok, enough to where three or four cheese sticks could have ample room to do their thing. I heated the oil to 360degrees F (I used a cooking thermometer for this.) After only just a few seconds, certainly less than a minute, they began to look like this:I was pretty pleased with my fried cheese sticks, especially when paired together with chicken and bacon pizza and ranch dip. Yum!
If you make this yourself, here's a few problems I ran into:

the temperature of the oil was a lot more important than I thought. The oil has to be hot enough so that those little sticks will brown quickly, before the cheese melts. At one point, I turned down the heat because some breading had fallen off and was starting to burn....but then the cheese melted out before the cheese stick was sufficiently browned.

I think using the egg instead of the milk might have helped the breading stay on better, but I use only milk for chicken fried steak and it seems to work ok. Any thoughts or suggestions?

My breading tasted good but seemed a little off. Rachel suggested toasting the bread before I blend it? I thought of maybe adding some flour or crushed up crackers to the breading mixture to give it a bit different consistency? I'm not sure. Again, any thoughts?

The last issue is that when we ate them fresh, within a few minutes, they were excellent! But after the initial taste test, by the time plates were on the table, girls had bibs on, and everything ready to sit down and eat, they had cooled to the point of marginality. How to solve that? besides doing it all ahead of time? how do restaurants to it?!

Well, there you go. I'm not interested in competing on Top Chef, but for recreating tastes of America I'm game!

happy children's day!

Not usually celebrated (at least to my knowledge) in America, but celebrated here is "International Childrens Day". On June 1st, all the preschools had special little shows, older kids got out of schools, and the dentistry profession gets further assurances it will be needed in the future, what with all the candy that is bought for kids on this day alone.

Our preschool had been preparing for weeks in advance for the big Children's Day shindig. I, of course, was asked to do some special little "program" which I was only vaguely sure of what they wanted me to do. I asked around to see what the other teachers were doing and picked something accordingly. Being the only english teacher representing the "English department" (haha) at the preschool, I felt some pressure to do something that was not lame. After my initial choice fell flat after a day of testing (I tried do an old youth group number - dum dum diddy, you know where you hit your lap and then your neighbor's lap...yeah, yeah...sometimes I can still see rob doing that in my sleep!) I ended up choosing a little action rhyme from a past issue of High Five (the 2-5year old version of Highlights - shameless plug to all you preschool parents out there...my kids adore these magazines!) It was about a certain big grey elephant who lived in the jungle.

Anyway, we practiced it a few days in my english class and the kids liked it and actually could do it with me. Nice.

I also got to watch the four and five year olds practicing their numbers in the afternoons after my class got out. The five year old girls were going to be dressed up as ballerinas, prancing about the stage waving ribbons that would eventually come together to form the olympic rings at the end of the number. Some of the naughty, ahem, I mean energetic boys would be doing a kung fu demonstration under the direction of teacher Peter. And then the girls I really like (and posted pics of on my blog) were going to be dancing the life cycle of a sunflower, complete with little sunflower costumes. Even I, with my lack of affection for bustling crowds, was looking terribly forward to it. Josh and I both agreed it would be fun to take the girls, too. In the end, josh also came and so that was really fab.

So before we get there, we were notified that on children's day, all the kids get a little present from the preschool - new clothes! (that look strangely like uniforms...) but anyway, Emma got her own little set of preschool clothes so she got to wear those to the big party.

So here are the pictures I took, though I have to confess my ignorance of acheiving good lighting in bad-lighting sitations and am open for any ideas for the fab photogs who read my blog

A "Where's Waldo?" game for you. Can you find Emma? :)

A last encouraging word from teacher Peter before the class of dancing chickens take the stage...I never saw these kids practicing before the program, but these barely 18-24 month olds were representing the olympic mascots. They all wore makeup. Even the boys. For once in our asia lives, all these video cameras were not pointing at us!Kung-fu boys enjoying the olympic mascot danceEnter dancing chickens, stage left:

kung fu boys:

Samantha eventually moved from her spot on the front row surrounded by unfamiliar places to the back of the crowd where she could stand on a stool and laugh at everything! She loved it!Emma actually went up on stage with me and did the Elephant Walk, but there are no pictures of that since I was the photographer. :) After all the festivities (which included josh being called up as a volunteer for teacher Peter's "program") we went to all the classrooms and passed out bookmarks that had special words on them about how children are a blessing from the Lord. We all had a great morning, and we finished the fun off by picking up lunch at kfc and having a picnic in park next door.

Here are a few more pictures of happy parents and children celebrating children's day together with us...

(of course, we all know that children are the center of asianese families, but this picture - with energetic little tao tao being filmed by both of his parents - cracked me up!)doesn't emma look like such a big girl in her school clothes?Mantha was all happy smiles around the other kids, and especially loves hugs from daddy...

Pictures I usually miss, part 3: life is just a bowl of cherries

I think I'm going to have to buy a mammoth telephoto lens or something, because I'm way too bashful about taking people's pictures. I hate getting all up and obvious in their face. Maybe I'll just plop down the big bucks so I don't have to be embarrassed.

Lucky for me, fruit seller dude caught me taking his pic and gave me a nice smile. thanks, fruit seller dude.

I caught up with him later down the street, taking a little breather I guess:

Pictures I usually miss: Part 2

Please do not park underneath live, hanging wires. For that matter, you probably shouldn't walk under them either. Or let your children walk under them. Thank you.

haircuts

My hair has been too long for a while. It gets nasty when it's too long. And tangly too. Time for a haircut. Barber: Josh

Emma's hair has been too long for a while. It gets nasty when it's too long. And tangly too. Did I mention tangly? Time for a haircut. Barber: Me.

Should I be referring to ourselves as stylists? Just wondering.

Results:

Not the best, but at least it's done.

You thought you'd get to see mine too? What are you...crazy?! :)

I'm not quitting my day job...at least, not yet

I couldn't think of anything to teach in my class today. I racked my brain and came up with nothing. So, I brought my fancy camera to school and took pictures of all the kids. I tried to "english-ify" it a little bit, so we practiced polite and mannerly phrases like, "May I take your picture, please?" (This is me trying to influence a tiny fraction of the billion people who don't ask before they paparazzi all over my children...) We talked about how to politely decline - no, thank you - and how to accept. It worked out ok. I definetly wouldn't want to have been judged as a teacher by my class today, but hey, in an hour it's all over.

That's the beauty of my little english class. I teach two 30-minute classes twice a week. Yep, that comes out to a whopping two hours a week. It's not much, and Emma gets to go to school for free. Seems good to me.

I really truly enjoy teaching. The kids are funny and refreshing...when they're not being super annoying anyway. They make me laugh, especially this one class that Emma is usually in. They're the younger of the classes but have lots of little kids that are so eager and cute.

Just last week, we finally were able to have four of the teachers over to our house. My pride and sense of self was wounded a few months ago when I invited all the teachers over and the principal totally brushed me off about it. I really like several of the teachers and hope it can be a good opportunity for me to make better friends and share more deeply.

so, without futher ado, here's some pics from today's lesson (mostly just the kids I like who didn't decline my very politely worded question):

Emma's favorite teacher:

ray-ray: the girl who ALWAYS corrects my asianese - I don't know why she didn't smile...


this is emma's best friend ever at the kindergarten. I'm not sure why her best friend is a boy, but it is. She always comes home and tells me stories about chase games and slide games with this little guy. Apparantly, she can never catch him at chase.

So those were from the class I really like. These are from the class I like when half of them are gone... :)

No, they didn't plan it that way...

This is Peter, the other teacher emma really likes. I didn't like him at first - he came off sounding a little bit of a know-it-all - but now I really like him. I liked this picture: the little kids watching from above while the big kids play basketball...