Birthday Party #1

Today was our last day of teaching! Well if you count partying with the kids as teaching... otherwise yesterday was it. Whoo! Four months with these kids and now it's just... over. It feels weird.

Anyway, one of my classes has been talking all week about throwing me a birthday party (my birthday is in a few days), but being children and all, I never thought they'd actually follow through with it. So imagine my delight when they showed up with pizza, cake, and juice! I jumped for joy. Literally. What sweeties.

Mmmm. America in a box.

Cake! Strawberry tres leches.

Awesome right? I love them.

Me with Lyah, Leslie, and Andrea. Leslie and Andrea were the masterminds behind the whole thing.

They really were happy. Mexicans just don't smile much in pictures... I don't know why.

Eating their pizza.

It was so great because the whole time they were saying, "Usted sientese, es su cumpleanos. No haga nada." (All right, all right, so I let them speak Spanish a little. It was the last day! Shhhh.) They made me sit there while they passed out the plates, distributed the food, poured the juice, everything. I felt like a princess!

They did let me cut the cake though. I didn't trust them too much with that one.

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Mexicans have this great trick for cutting cakes. Instead of trying to cut out long skinny pizza-esque pieces from a big cake like this, they cut a circle out from around the middle and then slice around it. The goal is that you eat everything around it and then the mini cake left over gets sent home with the birthday girl. But usually we just end up eating everything :)

Another tradition: La mordida! (The bite) The birthday girl gets to take the first bite out of the cake. Usually this results in their whole face being shoved into the cake, but I made my kids swear not to do that to me. 

Preparing for la mordida!

Yummm.

Another great part of the party was seven-year-old Roberto running around like Little Mr. Photographer. For some reason my camera wasn't working very well and Roberto was the only one that could get it to take pictures! So he ran around being hilarious and taking about a million pictures of me.

I think you get the point. Hahaha.

He tried to get some of the other kids too but they kept hiding! Here's his cousin, Eduardo.

I also let the girls get on facebook and add me during class. Because I'm really naughty that way. I wouldn't let them be friends with me until I wasn't their teacher anymore, but I figured today was close enough.

Facebookin' away.

After this we went outside and played some soccer with the boys. Some of them are seriously good. I can't wait to see the legit soccer stars they turn into.

The one in the striped shirt above is Jose Alberto. He's like eleven years old and seriously SO good at soccer. All the other kids hate playing with him though because they get schooled.

That one hanging off my arm is Adrian. He's a little teddy bear who today had an obsession with knowing what time it was. Literally every minute he would come up and ask. So I got to where I just threw my arm at him and kept playing. Haha. "Teachuh! What time is?"

Jen lookin like a pro.

We played for maybe fifteen or twenty minutes but then got thrown back inside because the students upstairs were taking tests and we were distracting them... Cryin' shame. So Jen and I squished about a million boys plus Ary into my little classroom and put Nemo on.

Poor Ary. She's always the only girl.

All the boys! They're crazy, but I love them.

It was such a fun birthday party! The kids were so sweet to me I couldn't even believe it. This is the stuff that makes teaching worth it! I will miss them all so much.