Turning 24!

My debater students decorated our board

Emma and I- I've taught her 4/6 terms!

MMMmmm cake

 My first (and only) birthday in Korea! For my 24th birthday, I'm totally doing it my typical style and stretching it out as long as possible.  First, my debater girls surprised me 5 days before my birthday with a little celebration.  A few minutes before class, the Korean teacher Joy tells me they need a few extra minutes to finish a hard lesson they're working on.  I happily wait in the staff room until Emma, a student, comes and gets me and says she has a question for me.  So I follow her into the classroom, which is dark, when they start singing happy birthday to me! On the desk is a bunch of cookies stacked in a shape kind of similar to a cake, with some candles stuck in a few of the cookies and lit.  I quickly blew out the candles before any more wax dripped onto the cookies :)  The board had been fully decorated with sweet messages.  Try not to read too much into the fact that when they wrote We Love Kathleen, the "Love" was in quotes :)  We're still working on teaching that concept to them haha. 







The next night, for our Friday night program, we had everyone over to our house for an early birthday party, like we had for Jon's.  There was sooooo much sugar that night.  2 ice cream cakes, 2 cream cakes, a pineapple cake, an apple cake, donuts, cookies, and sweet rice cakes.  We had a great time, and I received some pretty sweet presents.  Lots of face lotions, matching travel pillows, photo frames, a new nice wallet, beautiful flowers, 3 lovely scarves, vitamin C (which a teacher can never have too much of) and a really cool stamp of my Korean name.

Unfortunately, the rest of the weekend preceding my birthday was pretty busy.  Saturday I was in charge of the program, and Sunday we had to go to Gwangju (a town about an hour away), for some mandatory training.  We left at 7:30AM and didn't get back till about 6:00PM.  Long day.  Then, Monday, my actual birthday, is our busiest day of the week because of our weekly staff meetings and a class I only teach on Monday and Wednesdays.  But, I did wake up to some nice electronic gifts from back home, and Jon's gift was tickets to the Seattle Symphony when we get back home.  And, Jon and I still made time to go out to lunch and then to Outback's for imported brownies and ice cream :)  Apparently I have more presents waiting back home, but the givers refused to give me any hints as to what they are... 2 more weeks of birthday anticipation :)

Matching neck pillows for our upcoming trip home

The whole gang