Staff Blog
It has been 10 months since lockdown was implemented at CSC. A lot of growing pains have happened since then with the multi-disciplinary team, individually and collectively. For team members who were locked-in, that is about 300 days of living out of a suitcase, living with about 130 children and adults, requesting personal toiletries once a month with others buying it for you, yearning for your “own space”, missing face to face conversations with family and friends outside of work, and did I mention having your patience tested and tried?
On the other side of the coin, we have members on the multi-disciplinary team who work from home. One of the challenges included having to learn how to provide a remote service. Turning over or overcoming barriers in communication and technology was also highlighted. I can imagine the heartbreak of the frontliner to face the transition of not being able to see the children and directly work with them.
As leaders, we also battle to protect our frontlines in this pandemic, and I believe it starts with Connection. Keeping the morale and camaraderie high, training relevant, supporting and redirecting team members to keep their eyes on the goal has been a learning experience for me. In pursuit of deepening our connection with each other as colleagues, we are reminded that our identity and value is in Christ and that although challenges seem to limit us, we train our eyes to see beyond and steward the opportunities, skills, and talents that we have in our hands.
Despite these challenges, God is good and kind. He has given us creative ideas to implement, grace to talk about difficult matters, hope to put one foot in front of the other, and assurance in the sovereignty of our King when in doubt.
I hope that these pictures will bring a smile on your face and give you a closer glimpse on our journey as a team through this pandemic. Thank you to our family, friends, and stakeholders who continually remember us in prayer and partnership. Your connection matters to us, too.
Christmas Tree Contest: 1st, 2nd, and 3rd place.
House fathers hanging out.
Normal meetings these days.
J-O-Y!
Loving life....and more specifically....hackysacks! :)
Thank you to our visitors for giving every kid their very own hackysack---as you can see, they were eagerly received!
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SRA Day!
Last Friday was SRA Day at school! SRA is our reading curriculum so it includes reading, writing, and spelling! We spent the morning having some fun reviewing things the kids had learned in SRA throughout the year. It started off with one student from each level sharing why they like SRA. Then we had a cheer competition. The children were divided into four groups and each group had 10 minutes to create their own cheer about SRA or reading. It was cool to see what they came up with!
After the cheering competition was the spelling contest! The kids took turns writing letters or words on the white board as a review of things they had learned. They also drew pictures that related to some of the themes our classes had studied. Some of the older kids went up and explained how their pictures related to the theme.
The final part of the program involved several presentations by our kids. The Level A students performed sang "The Alphabet Song". Jaime and Pretchy each did a beautiful job sharing poems about reading! Shiela & Rowena sang a duet of "America the Beautiful", a song they learned in one of their reading units. Then three of our Level C students shared stories they had written during class.
Here are some more pictures from our exciting day!
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Friends
Friendships are an important part of life at CSC. Although most of our children have siblings at CSC (about two thirds), they all seek out friends in their age group and enjoy hanging out, playing, making music and talking about life. Our kids can easily find friends who have similar backgrounds and can understand and accept what they have gone through in life. Some friendships can go on for several years, depending on how long the children stay at CSC. When a child leaves for adoption there are often sad friends left behind who wonder if they'll ever see them again. In some cases, friendships that began at CSC can pick up later on when children are placed in the same geographical area. Check out a few pictures of friends at CSC:
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Movie Night
One of the things we often hear at CSC is laughter, and one of the best places to hear it is during a movie night.
It's hard to organize a trip to the movie theater, so often times staff will gather up a group of kids and setup the projector in the library at the school. The movie night below was a "girl's night out" that Teacher Lindsay organized. However, being the IT guy, I was allowed to attend because I had to setup the screen and projector. :)
The movie was Mr. Popper's Penguins.
It's hard to see much in the video below, but it's really fun to listen to the laughter of the kids.
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The Littlest Waveboarder
Waveboarding is the cool thing to do during playtime here at CSC. Lots of the older kids got waveboards for Christmas, but recently more and more of the little kids want to try the waveboards as well. The other day I noticed this little lady trying out her older sister's waveboard in the driveway and I couldn't stop laughing - it was so cute! And she's so good at it!
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