My mom and I have been exercising together in the mornings for the last five weeks. We usually walk about 4 miles per day, but today we decided to stretch ourselves and created our own 10K walk. We started at my mom’s house and then ended at my house! It was fun!! It gives you a feeling of accomplishment! We took a hand held GPS with us, so we would know our stats. Our average pace was 4.3 mph, and we finished in 1 hour and 23 minutes. We really kept up the pace!
I’ve always wanted to do a marathon, but I’ve always thought I couldn’t run the whole race, so now my new goal is to walk a marathon. It may take me awhile to get there, but I will do it!!
Today I visited Primary Children’s Hospital with one of my friends, Patty, to see her baby. Her baby, Laurie, was born at 24 weeks at 1 lb 11 oz. Now she is 8 weeks old and growing (she is now at 3 lbs), but she is still so tiny. It has been amazing to see all the miracles that have occurred with her. She is definitely a fighter!! She is such an adorable baby!
I was also able to see my cute nephew, Dylan. He is also at Primary Children’s recovering from a difficult heart surgery. He is recovering really well. They hope to have him home by this weekend. Unfortunately he’ll have to have more surgery in the future, but he’s a fighter too!!
It is amazing to see all that these babies have to go through. Patty told me that her doctor said that if an adult had to go through the same things that these babies have to, they would just give up. These babies are so strong! I am also impressed by their families! They keep going with such a positive and faithful attitude!
I finished teaching the Chinese students this week. It was a fun experience. It was completely different than I expected. I’ve heard that their schools are so strict and so we expected them to be perfectly behaved….teenagers are the same in any country I guess!
I have to share a few of their funny comments.
They asked what time we go to bed, and we we told them about 10:30 or 11:00, they said, we go to bed much later, that is why Americans are so tall. They get a lot of sleep!
When tasting pudding, they commented that it was really gross. They said that it tasted like snot. When one of the American teenagers said, I like it. They responded, do you like snot?
The day before they left, we had a farewell party. All the students brought their host families. It was really fun. We had a talent show, and only three groups signed up, but then all of a sudden everyone wanted to get up. The talent show reminded me of American Idol auditions! Most of the students got up and sang without any music, and as a result were slightly (okay really) off key. One student got up and started singing, he paused for a moment and we all clapped thinking he was finished. He said, “No this song 7 minutes!” Yikes….and he sang all 7 minutes of the song (4 pages of lyrics). After that he called his friends to come up and sing with him. We were afraid they were going to sing for another 7 minutes, but luckily they sang another song. So it was an entertaining, but LONG talent show! I’ve included a small clip of the show, just to give you an idea of the Chinese students singing! It’s not as clear as I’d like, but hopefully you get the idea!
After that, we presented them with certificates and they said something to their host families. It was sweet to see how much they loved their host families. A lot of them cried, except for the boys that said, “We are men, men do not cry, but we will miss our host families.”
I will admit, I’m glad it’s over, because it was a lot of work, but it’s been fun to learn a lot about another culture!
