back to the "real" world

since returning from peurto over a week ago, i have been quite a busy lady. (most fervent apologies for not keeping up with the blog as a result. i know many of you have jobs you don't want to do!!!) first of all, i have set up 2 more private classes for myself, putting my hours outside of school to just about 10 hours a week! it took some major engineering of my schedule but luckily one of the moms was cool and was willing to work with me so it is going to work out. i will meet one of my new students today in fact. it's kind of like im working for a living now or soemthing. my schedule is starting to look like it did before, full of apointments and to-do lists. wednesdays for example i am literally booked from 8am until 9pm.

i have been worrying a bit lately that with all of this work teaching english, and thus speaking english all the time, that i am not speaking enough spanish. this was getting frustrating because improving my spanish is my whole point in being here. to help remedy this though, i have set up and intercambio, or basically a language exchange with noelia's sister who needs to use english for her job. Macarena is really great and we are not meeting twice a week. she is great to practice with because not only is she patient, but my spanish kicks her english's ass so i feel much more comfortable and less embarressed of the state of my spanish.
Macarena is so sweet that she even texted me to go meet her and a few of her freinds for a beer on saturday night but i was already in route to a party with some other freinds. the party was put on my 2 girls at are in my same teaching program and it was mostly americans, spackled with varied europeans and of course a healthy dose of spaniards. that night we acgtually ended up adopting a little passle of euros because a guy in our program that we are freinds with had brought 8 freinds and had NOT made an sort of hostal reservation, assuming they would just stya out all night. although that plan does often work, by 5am at a club well across town from where they were theoretically planning to crach on the floor, the few that had managed to stay out that late were getting pretty tired, so maggie and i kindly offered our futon. i beleive we had a scottish girl, an irish guy and a belgian as well. they all teach in san lucar and have invitied us to visit anytime.

what else... well of course my little gypsies... they are doing fairly well! we have moved into making actual sentences in english now, instead of just learning vocab. we are currently working on prepositions and pronouns , ex: "where is juan? HE is ON the table." also, i am putting the ol' psychology major and experience working with ABA to good use by creating a token economy system for reinforcing learning and good behavior!!! i even set up a special adapted version for my oh-so-special juan herredia. (thats my 11 year old with the extreme ADD, and meriad other behavioral issues who also can't read. he's a treat.) but yeah, juan go his first sticker today, i was stoked. he chose the one that said "super!" for his token sheet, and one that said "great!" for himself.

ok, if i am going to get my essential tuesday afternoon siesta in i'd better get to it.
i hope you are all happy healthy and generally doing fabulous.
beso fuerte,
MC