A Day of Firsts

Today I took some pictures of my classroom.  The one looking outside is the view out my front door.  The other is inside my classroom.

One of top picture gives a first look at D and L's school uniform.  They were playing Blink on the balcony before school this morning.  All the other times I would try to take their picture with their uniforms on and they would just get all silly.  On a side note with the uniforms, last Friday was "colors day" where all kids could wear "regular kid" clothes.  Each kid who came to school in color clothes had to pay 5 Lempiras (about a  quarter).  The money goes toward, uh, I don't know yet, but I 'll find out.  It was a shock to my eyes to see all the kids looking - so, well - typical.  It's amazing how quickly my eyes have grown accustomed to seeing them in their uniforms.  I also love it around our house in the morning when the kids get dressed because the decision of what to wear is already made.  

Today was D's first day of soccer practice.  On Sunday, he was having second thoughts about it.  I think he was feeling nervous about trying something new in the sea-of-all-new-things he is trying.  But when school ended today, he was already in his cleats, shorts, etc. and was excited to got to practice.  It also really helped that his good friend Diego was also going.  All of the coaching was done in Spanish and it's a miracle in and of itself that he stuck with it the whole time.  But the most amazing thing was watching him run the entire time and put himself in front of the ball every chance he got.  He clearly was the least experienced kid on the field, but you never would have known it by the big grin on his face.  It was a joy to watch him go for it.  But there were also moments when we were worried that the other kids would get frustrated with him for his lack of understanding of how the game works.  At one point, we saw one boy from his team walking with his arm around D and I was imaging him explaining the rules of the game to him.  

When practice ended, D kind of fell apart with us, griping about this and complaining about that.  At first we were frustrated with him for being so difficult after the great feat of his first soccer game on foreign soil in a language he doesn't know.  We were ready to high-five him and celebrate with him on his own personal victory.  But then we realized that he had probably been operating on high adrenalin for the last hour and he was exhausted physically from running around the field more than any other kid out there and exhausted mentally for trying to understand what in the hell he was supposed to.