Either way, I showed up on Thursday afternoon and the Carrenos were sitting down to eat lunch, I guess they forgot I was coming over or something, but they invited me to sit down with them, and I did, and we talked a little bit. While they were eating, a bunch of teenaged dudes led by one of the campus managers came in and started remodelling their chimney, which apparently was malfunctioning. So it was a clamor of kids yelling and us trying to talk and then the other people staring at us or talking in German over us giving directions.
Right after lunch I got ordered outside by the kids, who wanted to go climb trees and play in the mud. Well, it turns out that all the backyards are connected, along with the houses - so there I was in what was effectively the backyard of the Pipps, the Lundblads, the Cassidys, the Wolters, and Dr. Hass (my medieval history professor), with not just Lina and Dani, but also a bunch of other yelling kids.
Turns out the kids love their connected backyards because they can run in and out of houses playing games with each other with abandon. That's great for them. That also meant that seeing a student outside, all the parents apparently decided it was safe to release their youths into my care.
I ended up monitoring Benjamin and Damien Wolter, Gianna Pipp, Lina and Dani Carreno, Harper Lundblad, and Hannes, Tobias, and Anna Cassidy. That's eight kids, folks. And they are all obsessed with climbing up trees, especially trees with really thin branches.
I was absolutely terrified for my charges most of the time. I helped them climb up and then hovered around in what was for them a very annoyingly helicopter-mom way, and yelling for them to come down if they started getting up into the high, really thin branches.
I kept an eye especially on Gianna. She has a bunch of older brothers, so I think she feels like she has to do a bunch of dare devil things as well. She likes to climb up as high as she possibly can get, find the thinnest branch, and then dangle bodily off of it, all the while calling me a Baby because I get scared when she does that. I wasn't sure how frequently these kids decided to turn into monkeys, so maybe I was being overprotective, but dang, my heart was racing.
Lina's not even four yet and she climbed up onto the lowest branch of a tree, and I made sure to hover around her... Benjamin and Simeon seemed a little shyer and didn't even try to climb trees, which is funny because their Dad is like an ex Marine general and super athletic looking, and his kids were the most hesitant.
Gianna has this thing where she leaps out of trees at random moments, yelling, "CATCH ME!" and I had to make sure that I was there to catch her. Which, I'm not the biggest of people, so I was kind of terrified when these kids came flying at me down from a tree. Even Dani decided that once he'd seen me catch Gianna a couple of times that he would try it out too, and Dani is significantly bigger than Gianna.
Anna Cassidy seemed to have the most sense of all of them - she's going to grow up into a firecracker. She was ordering me around, going, "Student, will you please watch Gianna, I think she's going to jump", or "Student, what's your name, you need to go watch Benjamin because I don't know where he went", or "Student, can you please be with Dani", that last one because Dani decided to go knock on the Lundblad's door and invite their kid out to play.
None of the other children seemed to know Harper, so when they came to drag her out of her house she seemed extremely hesitant and it was funny. I was really glad that Harper speaks English and was ten years old, and I found in her a kindred spirit... as all these other kids were racing around stabbing each other with sticks or throwing mud or leaping out of trees or crying randomly, she and I would trade glances like we were on a sitcom or something and we were looking at the camera in exasperation.
The other kids don't speak American English - they all have accents - so they kept calling Harper "Hopper". I think it's a really cute nickname. If my name were Harper, I wouldn't mind if that one stuck.
Anyway, when Mrs. Carreno came back to find me hording a squad of angry stick-wielding children she thanked me profusely and seemed very amused at the sight of me also wielding a stick (my stick was mostly for appearances and for looking more intimidating and authoritative). She also told me she wants to have me over for dinner sometime after ten day break.
Jeez, I'm thinking, I saw some other girls over there at the other houses, and I think they were doing Ministry to Moms too, so what I want to know is why they came outside, stared at the chaos racing around me, and turned right around and went back indoors. Were there other children that they were watching? What the heck were they doing if they weren't helping me manage all these kids? What is their purpose? No wonder Mrs. Carreno wants to have me over for dinner.
Today (Friday) we had classes because we had none on Monday following Poland, so so far my entire day has been spent either in class or studying. By this afternoon I got really sick of reviewing Aristotle and Aquinas and Plato, and Clare was in a really hyper antsy mood (she even got to the point of bouncing on the bed, which I thought was kind of hilarious).
I think both of us are cracking mentally. I've been having intense longings to play videogames and not study, but I've decided on a happy medium where I just think about playing videogames and wasting brain space for hours on end, while I'm actually studying. It's like my motivation, but I'm never going to reach my goal. I also have been teaching myself German and Italian and memorizing European flags in between study sessions, which I realize is studying also, but it's studying something I want to learn. Problem is I'm having trouble finding a comprehensive course that teaches languages the way I can pick them up, so I'll keep looking around.
Clare bought a Playmobil the other day in the toy/school supplies store and assembled it and it's standing on her desk, its name is Alexandra if I remember correctly.
Both of us have been making random comments and laughing hysterically and wandering around buying chocolate and eating it. I don't think either of us feel particularly sane, but I can't figure out how individually we are going insane, because I think my insanity is different than hers.
I will admit though that today I broke and got some chocolate, but later this evening I was so tired of sitting around that I got up and went resolutely down to the gym, because I thought only one person would be there. It's a really small gym, so I was kind of worried that it would be weirdly awkward...just me and one other dude, Peter Norton, workin' out to absolutely no music, in a tiny weight room...
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| This is it, there ain't no more. |
When they saw me come in, I think Steven sort of recognized me from main campus, because I saw him in the gym a lot last year.
I was sort of intimidated, but then I remembered I've been going to the gym and handling being with a bunch of dudes in a small space ever since freshman year, which aside from Bradley is longer than any of those other people have been working out at the Franciscan gym. I just went to it and started doing my own thing, and it got really crazy really fast.
I kind of feel like the guys were showing off a little? They put on some really really loud music and were jamming out to it more than they were working out at first, like they were dancing around and one of them literally started monkey climbing up the punching bag, and doing workouts really fast and punching each other and making a lot of noise. The only person who didn't participate in this was Bradley, who I think was wondering why the heck his friends were doing that. Head-banging and jumping around like they were crazy.
I laughed at them and kept doing my workout, feeling rather weak and incompetent compared to them, and then Christian came in (he's the other twin) and started doing the worm and they all devolved into more antics and yelling, and then as I was running both the twins just kept randomly smiling at me and I think they thought it was really funny that I was in there working out, because as I had come in, one of their girl friends was just leaving, I think she'd only been in there a couple of minutes and then left.
But anyway they put on a song specifically just for me because "it's a really good running song!!!" and when I got off the treadmill Nathan came over and gave me a high five and told me good job for working out with all the dudes, and I told him that I did it all the time on main campus, but it was still really funny how stoked he looked.
Man, they were hyper. I think I worked out twice as hard just from all the energy in the room. I think Christian was going to give himself whiplash and strain his face from all the head-banging and smiling.
It wasn't really what I was expecting workout wise, because I was really hoping none of the popular guys would be in there while I was getting sweaty and looking gross, but it was still really fun.
And then I went and decided to slack off homework and study more tomorrow because I've been studying all day, and I skyped my parents, and here we are!
It's almost midnight, so I'm too tired to write... I might try anyway and once my brain decides to fizzle, I'll watch TV or learn more German and then go to sleep.
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