Volunteering at Livi's school & first Ayi babysitting

After the high of finding Gigi a preschool, I had a rude awakening at the first “class moms” meeting I had at Olivia’s school. A note came home asking for parents who wanted to be involved in the Pre-K class. So I had two new experiences at once. The first was leaving Gigi with Ayi for the first time. Whenever I am around she refuses to let Ayi hold her or even come near her, so I didn’t imagine this was going to go well. When I told Gigi I was going to a meeting at Olivia’s school during her naptime and Ayi would stay with her, she objected, loudly, but it had to happen sometime. She went down for her nap and I took a taxi to the school, which is about 25 minutes away, or 45 minutes if it’s pouring rain like it is today. Anyway, a ~30 minute taxi ride for $6 USD. Not bad!
The second experience was the "class moms" meeting. There were 6 moms meeting with Ms. Katie, Olivia’s pre-K 4 teacher.
Ms. Katie printed up a little agenda to talk about what kind of help she wanted/needed in the classroom, which as a recovering Intel person, I totally appreciated. But then 3 of the moms just launched into what they had done in previous years and started talking about all this stuff that was totally foreign to me. For instance, what exactly is a “room mom” and what are the responsibilities? After 5 minutes of discussing if the room mom should be one person or several people, I had to give up and say “what IS a room mom?” Wow, did that get the looks from the other moms. So much so that I felt compelled to say “Well, I’ve only been here 3 weeks and this is our first year at this school, so I need a little information.” At this point the ladies attempted to explain what a room mom was, but digressed back into how fun the cultural parties were last year. Luckily Ms. Katie stepped in and explained it so I was less lost.
As the conversation progressed, two things became clear: 1) These 3 women have older kids in the school and have had Ms. Katie as their children’s teacher before, and 2) they are not the kind of ex-pats I’ve run into so far who go out of their way to explain how things work. Luckily, Jessica (aka Robert’s mom) arrived late and came in and asked a few questions, making it obvious that this was her family’s first year at the school as well. I felt instant kinship for her and think we may have inadvertently just formed our own clique. And, you might be wondering, what about the 6th mom? Well, she was also first time student at the school, and is from America but does not speak very good English. I had a really hard time understanding her, but I did finally get that her name is Tiger. She was silent during the entire meeting, so we’ll have to see where she ends up on the mom spectrum. Hmmm.
So the amount of time that the parents are expected to be in the classroom is pretty amazing. There is reading time, scribing time (for journals and artwork), cultural learning lessons, arts & crafts, and holiday parties. It seemed clear that the expectation was 3-4 hours in the classroom each week for each mom. I was blown away, but then again, I’ve never done this before! The 3 moms from the clique all live in the housing compound that the school is within, so they can obviously pop over to the school anytime. Jessica and I both live ~30 minutes away so we’ll have to strategize on when and how to get to school for all this volunteering.
One of the things that I was most looking forward to about coming to China and not working was the chance to get involved in the schools. Now I find that I am totally intimidated by these moms! Although I do have one thing going for me, and that’s how I took notes during this meeting (once a program manager, always a program manager!) Ms. Katie looked at my notes at the end of the meeting and took them off and made copies for all the other moms. Guess I did something right!

Anyway, Jessica and I volunteered for the project to have 16 pillows made for all the students for rest-time. This means we’re headed to the fabric market! I will be absolutely no help in this endeavor since I have a total of 10 Chinese words, but Jessica says she has been to the fabric market a lot and I’ve been wanting to go there, so I basically jumped on her wagon (or minivan as the case may be).
Everyone says the fabric market is quite extraordinary, and is also the place where you can get any type of clothing made. Shanghai is known for its excellent tailors. I doubt the really good ones hang out at the fabric market, but I think if I can just find some pretty good ones, that will do for the kind of clothes I want to have made at first.
It seems that I might want to have a couple dresses or skirts made. Jessica warned me that if I plan to get involved with the American Women’s Club Shanghai, I should be ready to wear my high heels and dress clothes, and be sure to wear my best jewelry. Her assessment was that it was a bunch of women socializing and comparing the kind of ex-pat deal they got and establishing how well-off they were. I am really hoping that Jessica’s assessment is a off because it looks from their website like the AWCS has a ton of activities (tours, lectures, classes, etc) that I would like to take advantage of. And I really really don’t want to get caught up in some kind of materialistic show & tell with a bunch of other women. What I want is a network of people who are like-minded and interested in learning and seeing Shanghai and China. We’ll see I guess.

When I got home, Gigi and Ayi were in the Clubhouse playroom having a great time. Clearly she is happy with Ayi when I’m not around. So my afternoon was a mixed bag, good that Gigi can happily stay with Ayi, and bad that I’m intimidated by a bunch of moms I’ve never met before today.

Oh my goodness, I almost forgot to tell you how incredible it is to have a fulltime ayi who is also a good cook!!! Xiao Chen starting working on Monday and has cooked for us the last two nights, and it’s positively yummy. Her stir fry is very good, and she can just seemingly throw stuff together from my refrigerator and have it come out tasting great. I actually enjoy vegetables when cooked this way!!! And another great thing is that she cooks normal-people portions, not the American super-size portions. If we’re still hungry at the end of the meal, we could always fill up on rice, which is typically what Chinese do. Actually, portion size is great everywhere here. There are smaller Snickers bars, and miniature bags of Skittles. It’s a blessing to buy something and not think “OK, half of this would be normal, so I’ll buy it and put half away for another time.” Because I never do that, my will-power is non-existent. I like having smaller portion sizes imposed on me! But having someone to cook for you is everything it’s cracked up to be. If I ever win the lottery in the US, I’m hiring a cook. Although, I guess I could argue that we did win the lottery when we took this deal to live in China.

One last quick story before I go tonight: Many of you know my “man-size plate” dilemma. We have plates in the US that we got at Pottery Barn, and these plates are huge (basically the size of chargers). At our first apartment they didn’t fit in the dishwasher, at our first house they didn’t fit in the cupboards, and at our second house they made it into the dishwasher but still not into the cupboards. When packing for China, I refused to bring these huge plates, reasoning that if they didn’t fit in a cupboard in the States, they certainly weren’t going to fit into a cupboard in China! So we get here and I make a trip to Ikea to buy a set of dishes. I am very excited about my new dishes and I bring them home and wouldn’t you know it, the dinner plates don’t fit in the dishwasher! I clearly pissed off the plate gods at some point and am being punished for it. Either that or there is some plate size conspiracy that I didn’t get the memo on.