Wow! It's December!!

11/28 - So much snow!!! It's here for good no was of a few days ago :(

11/29 -Sometimes it can be just so beautiful here! I think this was a sunset but it was only like three in the afternoon

11/30 -Natasha is my girl. She's the one in stripes here. After having an awful time with 90 minutes of roudy kids, we get to store and two girls didn't get prizes. They both completely burst into tears along with lots of screaming. Natasha did get a prize but gave it to one of the girls and then sat and patted Paulina's head to make her feel better. It made me want to cry because I appreciated her help so much!

12/1 - Class was outside today for an hour. I am pretty sure that is the dumbest, most irresponsible decision I have ever heard in my life. Class outside isn't so bad except that this was the first time since it's snowed. Now remember that we have like a foot and a half of snow and the temperature has been around 15 degrees or so if we are lucky. These children (22 of them) were all bundled up but had already been playing outside for an hour when we got them. Apparently it's a new rule that children here have to have 40 minutes of Russian classes then 2 hours of outside time in the mornings. Anyways, they were so frozen that they would come up to us in tears because their hands were so cold from their wet gloves. We tried our best to warm them up by rubbing our own hands around theirs but it didn't really make that much difference. We started trying to sing songs and do some teaching but it got to the point that I made the executive decision for all that we bag any sort of learning and just have the children run around to keep them warm as best they can. We had fun despite feeling like we were suffering from frostbite. I hope we can figure out a way to change this and have class indoors - this is just stupid and it makes me furious to have these children suffer (I'll step off my soapbox now)