Click on this pic to see Burl's beautiful brown eyes.
Ivo and Burl have colds. Ivo's is super slight - negligible. Burl's a little deeper. On Monday, Karin babysat the boys so they could avoid the daycare germies - yay! 
Boys are mostly good. Burl's happy but cranky, congested and has a sad sad cough - if he's like this tomorrow, I don't want him to go to school... Today, the boys have stayed in their jajamas, as Ivo says, all day. Its nice - kinda feels wintry - even though we're all barefoot, in short sleeves or pant-less. The typhoon swirled as close as it's gonna get and left. Rain - not a lot, but WINDY! It was dark this morning and Ivo slept til 9:30. Even though it was dark, Burl woke at 6:15. Ouch!
Last night while playing with Ryan, Ivo bit him on the thigh. Right about then, playtime ended, Ivo was sad, we went up to bed. Biting has never been an issue with Ivo, he got bitten a couple times and I think, retaliated once - all well over a year ago. And, come to think of it, a few months back, he bit Burl... Upstairs Ivo and I were talking about not biting people cuz it HURTS and Ivo said, "YEA, Lu-ping bite me. I crying." I asked him where Lu-ping bit him, Ivo said, "At Baby World." I'm still not clear on what part of his body but it may have been a finger. Again, we were talking on Monday night - Ivo hadn't been to school since Friday, so this wasn't fresh information and biting has never been mentioned in his communication book. I know 2-year-olds aren't the most reliable sources, but I don't think Ivo was making this up. It sounded real. The only aggressive behavior the teacher has told us of is Ivo pushing other kids. So, I'm gonna ask about it in his communication book tomorrow.
This biting - real or imagined - may give me a little "hand," as they say, with the Baby World peeps. I don't think anything totally foul goes on at Baby World, per se. And my god, if I intimated I thought things weren't on the up-and-up, Ryan would make me quit my job. And while I admit to being out of touch with what is standard daycare operating procedure in Western countries, the Baby World policy of not allowing parents inside the school doesn't feel right to me and I've pretty much decided I'm not gonna follow that rule.
At Baby World there is a full-on concerted effort to keep the parents outside the school, and if they must come in, they are confined to the shoe changing area. Isabel mentioned this when Ivo was first starting. The way they keep parents out is by having a staff member run out to help you get your kids into school when you're dropping them off, and by ushering your kids - who are all pre-dressed and back-packed by the time you arrive to pick them up - out/over to you. When I've tried to enter, the staff member assigned to work the door spreads her arms wide, running interference. Choreography.
Quickly and efficiently transferring custody of the children IS convenient - for a lot of reasons, not to mention, it's possibly necessary to keep traffic jams to a minimum. In fact, the whole thing is reminiscent of a fast food drive-through. And while I don't need dozens of parents parading through the school, gawkers or otherwise, it feels wrong that (my) children's parents are prohibited from ever seeing their kids in situ. However, actual and con-artist kidnapping is HUGE in Asia - so maybe Taiwanese parents feel safer with their kids locked in a building in which even they, the parents, are unwelcome.
The thing is, little kids can't tell you what's going on. I don't need to know every single thing that happens, but I'd like to have a general sense of the classroom dynamics, what it looks like when the kids are all together.
During the first week that the boys attended Baby World, I asked if I could sit in with Ivo to help him adjust since he's never been to school before and he hadn't been in an unmediated Chinese Language setting since before Burl was born. The lao ban, Buding Mama, said NO - cuz my presence would freak out the other kids.
OK - fair enough, I thought at the time. And now, Ivo seems to enjoy school; he looks forward to it and doesn't complain about going. However having taught in kindies/day care centers in Taiwan, I can't just trust Buding Mama. I expect administrations to both withhold unsavory information as well as to outright lie.
During the SARS outbreak of 2002/3, schools and businesses began taking everyone's temperature before anyone could enter. My employer, Perfection Kindergarten - a misnomer, believe me - used this pivotal moment in history as an excuse to lock parents out of the campus in the name of both children's safety and public health. Cynical? Maybe, but there's more.
While SARS was spreading throughout pockets of Taiwan's population, Taichung simultaneously experienced a severe - but not as bad as the deadly 1998 outbreak- bout of Hand Foot and Mouth Disease (enterovirus). For weeks, my class of 25 students was reduced to as few as 7. More than half my students had the enterovirus, but because the parents weren't coming into the school, they had no idea how many kids were sick - with an infectious disease. And, because the parents were kept away from the empty classrooms, from each other, as well as from the teachers - who had been ordered NOT to discuss absentee numbers - the school did NOT report the cases of HFMD to the Taichung Dept of Health. At the time, the DoH would shut down a class for a few days (not the entire school) if there were 2 or more students infected with the enterovirus.
Finally a parent of one of my students, a journalist for the Liberty Times, broke the story - and we got the classroom cleaned. The school lost face - but not enrollment.
So, I dropped in at Baby World on Wednesday between classes to nurse Burl. Of course they had to let me, though it seemed like a novel request. Burl was brought out to me, I was not allowed to walk past the classrooms to the nursery. There was a toddler screaming the whole time I was there and I hoped it wasn't a classmate of Ivo's. When I had to leave I headed back towards the nursery and was quickly stopped, just outside Ivo's classroom. He looked sooo cute sitting at the miniature table with the hood up on his Superman vest sharing a book with a classmate. I said a quick hi-i'm-so-proud-of-you-i-love-you to him. No kid seemed stricken. No kid, including Ivo, left his/her seat. I was relieved to see that the screaming kid was across the hall - I didn't investigate - I don't wanna be a butt-inski - I just want to see how Ivo's doing and he was fine. However his friend, D-man was sleeping at 4:30, while his teacher reported in his communication book that he woke up at 3:30.
So, I dropped in on Friday too - I had a bottle to give Burl.
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