And you thought snakes were scary

They’re not. Four year old triplets – now that’s scary. Our assignments have started to roll in and our calendar is filling up fast. After a 2 hour school delay this morning, Jeanna and I went to the gym to work off a bit of the laziness that’s accumulated since Thanksgiving. When we got home we took a look out our calendar and found that we’d been scheduled for two days in a home of elementary school boys. We dug a little deeper and found out that of the six boys, three of them are in fifth grade and the other three are four years old – and they are triplets. Suddenly, the snakes aren’t so scary anymore.

We have a while before that takes place (2 weeks) so we have plenty of time to prepare ourselves for the situation. I’m sure it will be a very tiring but enjoyable experience.

I’ve still not come up with a solution for high speed internet and I am running out of options. I think I could get DSL but I would also have to buy another telephone line to make it happen and I just can’t seem to bring myself to paying $80 – $100 per month for high speed internet. I may just have to break down and do it to save my sanity. Some people smoke, some drink, some do drugs, some do all of the above. I surf. It’s my vice.

Snow Frenzy

A great deal of snow is on the ground already and as I type, it is continuing to accumulate at a rapid pace. School was canceled on Monday, which made for somewhat of a long day. We are working in a high school girls home this week, so the day mostly consisted of monitoring the girls while they watched soaps (or as I like to call them, “afternoon porn”) and cooking for them. I was a little surprised that a high school girls home didn’t do any of the cooking themselves, but this one didn’t. We are assisting a house father this week, whose wife has been off on medical leave. As we were about to prepare lunch for the girls, he called upon me to get things started. My only thoughts were we are in serious trouble if he thinks I am the cook of the house and he is definately mistaken if he thinks the woman should do all the cooking. Lucky for me, Ryan is a master chef and an equalitarian, so the two of us had no problems preparing all the meals.

This morning we woke up to find out that school had been delayed for two hours. The nice thing about this was that we were able to sleep in until about 7:30am, rather than having to get up at our usual 5:30am. The down side was that it meant we lost two hours of our “off” time. I guess if you get technical, we didn’t lose any time, we just wasted it sleeping.

The way things are going, I seriously doubt the kids will have school tomorrow. I guess we can look forward to another day of cooking while watching afternoon porn. And to think that some of you thought we were crazy for taking this job.

Easy Like Sunday Morning

We got up this morning and headed to the mandatory chapel service. All students and at least one houseparent per family is required to go to chapel service every week. This post is actually a result of going to that service.
The service was entitled “commitment” and since I made a commitment to Jeanna that I would make a post today, here it is. I have been unmotivated lately but hopefully this will be the end to all that. There has been a real struggle lately between high speed internet and I. I have been unable to get it very easily. Most of my free/computer time has been taken up with this quest.

Today was, indeed, easy like Sunday morning. We have been sitting around most of the day but managed to get away by taking some kids out to the mall for a few hours – not my idea of a great time, but it got us out of the house for a while. The forcast calls for snow, sleet, and freezing rain later today and tomorrow so the students could actually be out of school tomorrow. While cancellations are extremely rare, they are possible and they mean that houseparents (us) lose their “off” time. We’re hoping for cooperative weather so we can relax a little. The weekends are going to be very long – that we know already.

Driving Miss Daisy

We are just beginning to experience the true meaning of the word “houseparents”. Ryan and I had our first overnight experience in a student home on Sunday and Monday nights. We weren’t supposed to experience it this soon, but an emergency came up and we were called in. The wife of the couple who was originally supposed to be there had a family emergency arise. Since the home they were scheduled to work in was an all girls high school home, the husband was not allowed to stay the night by himself. This is where we came in. Our supervisor called with a very desperate voice on Sunday afternoon wanting to know if we would be willing to stay the night in a student home that night. Of course we said yes, (although I secretly wanted to say no just to see what his reaction would be) so the plan was for us to show up at 9:30pm, along with the husband of the original couple who was scheduled to be there. He was not going to stay the night, just show us the ropes since we pretty much had no idea what to expect.

What happend was probably not much different than what many of you reading this already know and do. You take care of your children, making sure they do their chores, helping them cook (ok, you probably cook FOR them, but we lucked out), and making sure they get to work, practice or wherever it is they need to go on time. That’s pretty much what we did. There was one girl in the home was was very involved and seemed to have somewhere she needed to be at every hour. Ryan decided to call her Miss Daisy because he said he felt like he was Driving Miss Daisy all day and night. I secretly think Ryan loved driving the girls around because he always said he wanted so many kids he needed a bus to get places. Hopefully a few years of doing this will get that out of his system.

Since Monday was a holiday, there was no school. After the girls woke up (around 11am), it didn’t take them long to get restless. This meant that Ryan and I became restless as well. Unfortunately, we couldn’t take them anywhere because many of the girls had gone home for the long weekend, so we had to wait around the house for those who were gone to be dropped off and get checked back in.

Overall, we had a really good experience and enjoyed it. We are scheduled to shadow regular houseparents the rest of this week, so hopefully that will be helpful. Our schedule will normally be that we work from around 6am until 8:30am, have our free time from 8:30am until about 2pm and then start working again around 2pm until the kids go to bed. We’re learning quick that we aren’t going to be getting the eight or nine hours (sometimes even 10!) of sleep we’ve become used to.

Winter Wonderland

Today we woke up to an even prettier landscape. It snowed about three inches last night, so everything on campus is covered in snow. It looks really beautiful (from our window, at least). We still have yet to get dressed and venture outside. There was nothing scheduled for us today, so we decided to sleep in and then see what the roads were like. According to the news, the roads seem to be fine, so we are thinking we may head to York, PA to take a tour of the Harley Davidson plant. We definately need to take advantage of our day off and do something fun because tomorrow we will be stuck learning CPR and First Aid from 8:00am to 5:00pm.

Ryan is patiently waiting to get his computer set up in our apartment. He is unable to connect to the school’s T-1 line, so we are waiting for instructions on what we need to do to get our own high speed Internet connection. Hopefully we will get this information by tomorrow, so we can get set up and connected by the end of the weekend. Once Ryan’s computer is up, we will be able to upload some pictures so you all can see our new home. Until next time . . .