Thursday, February 14, 2008
Feliz dia del Carino
Shalom, with one of her valentines, our little neighbor Juan Fer. He even picked a flower from the grass to give to her!
Sunday, February 10, 2008
Creeping? Crawling?
Just this week, Dahlia has made great "strides" in creeping (crawling?), sitting, and standing up with support. This is the kind of fun we have at 7 in the morning on Saturdays when the rest of the world is sleeping.
Casa del Sol
One of the things we enjoy most about our time in Guatemala is the excellent and affordable child care. That extends to Shalom's preschool, Casa del Sol. Her teacher, Carmen, has created a Waldorf school where the children garden and play in an environment that is designed to be "unstructured." Shalom goes every day unless she is sick, but some of her schoolmates only go two or three times a week. A friend of her teacher picks her up and drops her off, so there is little hassle for us besides remembering to pay, sending fruit on Wednesdays, and repairing the broken toys Carmen has been sending home lately. Every day, the kids work in an organic garden from which they harvest and eat vegetables. On Friday, I spent a few hours there since Michael and I had no school. First, Shalom and her little friend Simon (damn that kid's cute--he really makes me want to adopt a little Guatemalan boy) played indoors with some wooden vegetables. Then, the kids put on their rubber boots to go outside. Shalom and Simon took turns filling watering cans which they dump in random parts of the garden. There are quite a few gringo American kids enrolled, but they are outnumbered by the Spanish-speaking Guatemalans which makes for a bilingual but mostly Spanish-speaking school. Besides the gardening component, the Waldorf philosophy advocates letting children's imagination run wild in a neutral environment, so the school features a lot of unpainted wood toys, colorful scarves, and nothing decorating the walls. The students help cook and then eat a healthy meal each day. When I got home, I eyed our many bright-colored electronic noise-making toys with a new dose of skepticism.
Check out their website:
http://waldorfguatemala.blogspot.com/
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