Thursday, April 22

It’s been raining almost every afternoon here now; I think the rainy season has arrived! And yet I still forget to bring my raincoat. Wednesday we went to town like usual, but in the rain so I was all wet. I stayed at Guancascos to use the internet since it wasn’t working well at the house. Thursday I instituted a new checkmark system for classroom management. My kids are good kids and few give me actual attitude, but they do tend to interrupt each other and me or get out of their seat quite often without permission, which is frustrating when I’m trying to teach. So I was stricter with them that if they did those things, increasing checkmarks with increasing consequences. I try to be lenient, but I also need to follow through because if I don’t, my class might get too out of hand by the end of the year.

After school and the afternoon downpour, Tad and I decided to check out the river behind my house because we hadn’t been down there since we’ve received all this rain. We hiked on down, wearing shorts because it was still humid. We climbed over our normal spot we sit on and went up the river a little ways, finding a nice rock to sit on. We were sitting there, enjoying the view and the rush of the water since we hadn’t heard that in a month or two, when my foot near the water started getting wetter. It kept getting wetter until we turned around and literally saw a rush of water coming down the river. I was like, “Go, go!” and we scrambled over the rocks to get to the opposite closest shore. In 10 seconds or less the spot we had been sitting on was under water! We were just ‘in the right place at the right time’ with the time delay from the storm to the water rushing down the mountain. Stuck on the opposite side of the river, we had to figure out a way to get back to the correct side. We found a fallen tree, shimmied across that, stomped over some tall grass, and followed the water pipes to the field behind our house. Our legs were all scratched up from wearing shorts, but it was quite the adventure; we won’t be going down to the river after a rainstorm any time soon.