Mona Lina Smile

Lina smiles, she is sort of shy, and seems to try to hide behind her smile or behind her hair. She is awkward as most teenagers. As she smiles, her shoulders go up, and she shrugs them. I don't want to analyse my kid, I want to experience her and let her be herself. Yet I have the hardest time doing it.
She is so sensitive that she reflects many of my fears, worries, and usecurities. there are millions of things going through my head that I want my kid to do, or that I want her to be. Mothers are strange; they are often very irrational when it comes to their kids. They are the biggest projectors of their unsecurities on their kids. I will try my best to be happier and more relaxed with my life, but I am not perfect. I hope that my kid has potential to grow out of me and become her own true self. I hope she stops hiding.

Camp Life

Right now we are doing our best to educate, entertain, and care for our student , LyLa. On Tuesday we took the girls on a field trip to a mountain. Nathaniel was getting them research a stream there; they had to take some water samples and study them for animal life and quality of the water. Our girls were supposed to take water samples in 10 different locations. They did three only because LyLa got a crazily severe allergy on mosquito bite. Her elbow got swollen three times if its normal size because of one bite. We had to go back. So the conclusion of the scietific investigation was that Kum Geong stream is unhealthy. It doesn't support animal life due to pollution. Good job, Korea, taking care of its nature's health. We need to get more kids interested in their environment. Koreans are generally very out of touch with it.
On Thursday I brought LiLy home to make tuna salad sandwiches.

And here comes the spoiler

Bruce, careful and attentive to details, who loves feeling his feet touch the ground as he walks and who is so dedicated to drinking his green tea that he venturs into China just to stock up on some of the "good produce" of that magic drink, has become my first follower. I got very excited; I trust Bruce, intuitively I trully trust him. Incidentally Bruce became the first spoiler. As I realized I am being read and followed my peace of mind vanished and anxiety came. It is a crazy logic of fear. The fear created by having expectations that i put on myself, or perceive from others, expectations I create, interprete and bear. I know that all expectations must be in my own head, but God knows how much of my life i have spent trying to live up to expectations of others both real and imaginary. But I trust Bruce, and I should start trusting myself that I am a woman enough to deal with the ### that drives my life to the edge. I say 'good bye' to expectations. I say ' hello & welcome, my trusted follower and a good friend, Bruce'. I want to share. I need to share.

More on the subject of THE MAN of MT

MT stands for million talents. And THE MAN stands for Nathaniel. He cooks. And I eat his food. After being annorexic for years, and being completely, utterly, and hopelessly confused on the subject of food for more years, I eat, now I eat without fears, freak outs, I enjoy eating. Today we had hot dogs. It was my first hotdog in probably 7 or 8 years. I never remembered they existed. the world for me was without hotdogs. I watched carefully what he did with the fat sausage, how he smeared mustard and tomato sauce on it. I followed what he was doing. It was a very good hot dog. And my consciousness is calm; it doesn't talk crazy things to me about commiting a crime of eating hotdogs. Here are some photos of the awesome foods he makes, improvising all the way because we are in the absence of an oven or any important ingredients that his heart of a chef would wish for. these are some of the recent masterpieces, the ones I had on my camera. Cheese cake, and stuffed chicken. Honey, your culinary heroism in Korea is deeply appreciated. With love and peacefull consciousness, your wife who is ready to eat.

Lyla, and return of the prodigal student

We had our first and only student today by a beautiful name LyLa ( this is exactly how she spells it). LyLa was smily and very friedly.
class 1: Book reading (50 min)
class 2: Drama games with Nathaniel. They sang "let it be" song too after some serious voice warm up session. As I was in a room next door, I didn't really hear the girls' voices being warmed up. But Nathaniel gave a damn good warm up to his vocal cords. and he sings beautifully. A man of million talents!
class 3: Journal Writing.
Lots of attention to one student! Lina was there, and sort of tried to put effort and interest. It seems she enjoyed having a friend.
unexpectedly our prodigal student, Miss Park returned. Quieltly and gracefully walked in at her class time 5 o'clock. We tried to contact her for over a week when she didn't show up for classes and didn't receive our calls. And Nathaniel following his generous nature offers to make up the missed classes for her. Which means she can skip and they turn up any time and her classes will be given to her.
"We owe her classes"
'Nope, we don't".

And SHE SMILED and Kept her happiness

SHE is Lina. Lina likes to be grumpy, and likes to not follow rules. Actually she was never given any rules by me before because I had no idea about parenting. With my parenting I basically tried to do the opposite of what my mom did. But I still arrived at the same result. I was too involved with my kid, gave her no structure at all, and ended up with a "disempowered child". Nathaniel is basically couching me on how to be a parent, and how to take control. Many times I am shocked at how unequipped, clueless, and helpless I am as a parent and how I make bad and plain wrong choices when it comes to disciplining my child. Now with my new superNATHY at home and me taking charge, Lina was given some strict rules, and she is hating it. As a result, she is naturally grumpy and rude. She despises to be happy anywhere around us. everyday, all day. But today she was happy for a prolonged period of time. She was happy walking up the mountain with me in the morning; she happilly commented on the scenery around her; she did not complain about a long walk and sweating. She enjoyed stuffing chicken, poking its skin with a sharp knife and sticking pieces of garlic in it. She said she liked it, and it was fun! She doesn't like to express herself, but today she did it on several occasions. It made me happy too, not like her unhappiness makes me unhappy, but I was trully happy for her to start enjoying our company, even just today. she still looks pretty grumpy on the pictures, but there were smiles; they were genuine.

Current activities. hammer their heads up!

Currently we are marketing. We walk around the neighborhood, me carrying a big red sign saying "ENGLISH CAMP". Nathaniel on the bike. We come to HomePLUS shopping mall. We stand between two crosswalks. Nathaniel blocks footpath with his bike on one side and with our sign and himself on the other. I spot a potential mother, parent, a human with a child crossing the road. I charge to the target. I recite my advertising script. I hand in our flyers. Many ignore; some take the flyer with a slight bow and a smile; many flee for cover.
Basically we try different ways to talk, to block, to pursue potential customers. They don't know us; they don't pay attention; they are a bit in a zombie state. They don't know we are good for them.yet. We will persevere.

June 22nd, 2009, honey.

This day we went to Seoul and got married, well registered our marriage in NZ embassy and Korean local Gu office. The highlight of our seoul trip was visiting Chicken museum where my new husband is entering in the photo. Chicken museum as its names suggests is well a chicken museum.

now it is decent

This is how Erudite school looks like now. It is repaired, cleaned, scrubbed, furnished with some second hand office supplies (computers, photocopier, airconditioners, water dispenser) decorated with new books, and one new flower pot.

Oh my ...drip, drip, drip....

Here's my sexy man. what else can i say, i can only salivate looking at that straight, power look and flexed muscles. Am i not a wife of the sexiest man alive? !!!

More work every day

So every day we came there was more and more work to do, more tools to buy, more places to go search for tools and materials. the picture was me scrubbing the wall, that was the wall of hate. Previously it bore a big green sheet of material stuck to it by super glue; It was literally impossible to get off without scraping the wall for hours and wetting it with water. There was a wall like that in all of the five classrooms. All those walls was my responsibility to redeem.

then we worked our ### off

So it was pretty trashy and we started fixing it, which we did every day after work for a month. During the process Nathaniel was intoxicated by paint twice. And in general there was lots of swearing, crying, and shouting. But Nathaniel worked hard and painted the place almost entirely by himself. Lina was made to paint too, which she did with some sort of enjoyment.

What it used to be

Both Nathaniel and I wanted to have our own school for a long time, especially after working for Korean employers for years, which was extremely unrewarding experience to say the least. We didn't have a big start up budget. All we had was 20mil won. 10 mil went to pay deposit for the place, and 10 mil for set up expenses. Little budget means lots of physical effort on our part to fix the place. It was a real ##hole. People that used it before let the kids trash and vandalized it completely. Graphity on walls. torned lino, stacks of gum under every single chair and desk, human incriments on the balcony, broken ceilings, window stickers that baked into the glass. Here are some picture of what it looked like.

My blog's name

Hi, My name is Tanya. One of the biggest things about me that annoy my new husband is that I self-organize too much, another big thing is that I whine, and yet another big thing is that I nag, one more biggie that comes to mind is also my "mothering nature." I mother him too much and try to control everything. With some of these I agree, but I view them as positive characteristics, therefore I proudly call my blog tanya_whinya_self_org. because my self-orgaizing activities served me well in life and propelled me to some major successes and achievements.

Rent contract

May 16th, 2009, I signed a lease for our school. The deposit was 10mil won, which comes up to about 7,000US. Monthly rent is 400,000 won, or approximately 250US. The place was trashed and needed a ton of work.