This morning after getting all ready at the Girls Volunteer House, I made my way to the Comedor to the toddlers and walked back with them to the Toddler House. We were in the Sala watching Charlotte's Web for quite a while (I was assured they had school today), when a fight broke out between Sara and Abi. They were punching each other with their fists and pulling hair, over a TOY! So after them not listening to me tell them "no", I went over and separated them. I put Abi on the mattress on the floor and she stayed there (she is typically fairly obedient), and then I moved Sara to a mattress on the opposite end of the room, closer to the TV. But as soon as I set her down, she quickly got up and started running back to the toy. So I got her and set her in the same spot. She got up again and started to run (towards the toy). This went back and forth a few times before I decided to set her up in the raised bed (with railings) in the room...which I only did because another fight broke out, between Fernanda and Natalie. It is typical for these 2 girls to get into a fight, whether with each other or with other toddlers, but they were doing the same thing, punching with fists and hair pulling. So that was my next mission was to separate them. They stopped fairly quickly when they saw me coming. I put them each on a separate couch. It was then that I looked around the room and saw that there were no big girls in there to stop these fights and/or help me. So I headed to the door to see where they all went because me with 14 toddlers??? Well, toddlers are just not my specialty. God gave me a gift to work with teenagers. As I neared the door, Moises decided to grab Gerson's head and repeatedly slam it against the brick wall. I definitely needed help. Dunia was outside the door talking to all of the big girls that lived in the Toddler House. Some of them were crying. She told me later that she had to have a fairly serious chat with them about some things going on around the house.
I walked with the toddlers to the school and once they were in class, I headed to the Volunteer House to try to finish up the lesson preparations that Profe Dayana gave me. At some point during the morning (possibly following all the toddler fights), my right eye began twitching and just wouldn't stop all morning. I had to take constant breaks from lesson prep, just to settle down a bit. I swept the entire house and cleaned a few other things around the house. About 11am, I thought perhaps if I took some Ibuprofen, it would stop twitching (since perhaps it was muscles around the eye doing this). By lunch, the twitching had stopped. Thank you, Ibuprofen! Also by lunch time, I had finally finished all of the lessons that Profe Dayana had given me to prep! I will be taking them to her tomorrow to see if there is anything else I can do before I leave. At lunch, Nora told me that there was going to be another team dinner. That would make 2 team dinners, however to be fair, there are 2 teams down here right now...one from TN and one from CA.
In the afternoon, I did some more cleaning and lost track of time. I was supposed to meet Dominic at the Tienda at 1:30pm to work on more long division. However, by the time I checked my watch, it was 1:45pm. I headed down to the Tienda quickly, but he was already gone. There were so many team members taking entire houses of kids to the store that I am not sure we would have gotten much done anyway with all the chatter and distractions, so later I found him and told him we would work more on Thursday, which is the day the teams were headed out. That way it would be more quiet.
I made my way to the Toddler House then, since they should have been just waking up from their naps. It was still pretty quiet in the Sala for those who were still napping. Brithany came over by me just to sit and stay by me. When everyone was awake, they were taken to the bathrooms to shower before supper, and then we headed to the Comedor. I made sure Brithany ate all her food...I don't feed her until the last 2-3 spoonfuls when I am scraping the bowl to make sure she eats everything. When the toddlers were done eating, I said my goodbyes to them and then made my way back to the house to organize a few things, clean out the coffee pot and put some dishes away. At 6pm, Nora and I headed to the Team House for dinner with the teams and the other staff. We had pork, potato salad, salad, and some sort of bread with garlic(?) as well as a cookie of some sort. Once again we sat with LaShawn and had a good time.
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