*whew*

now i can breathe a sigh of relief. vacation bible school 2003 is finally over! no more typing of kids' names, their parents' names, contact numbers, age, sex and t-shirt size. i have been adding & editing the details every day for the past week or so.

even though the dateline is far over, malaysian parents tend to think that as long as the event hasn't started, there is no such thing as a dateline. for every name that comes in, i have to allocate a slot, check for errors, sort out the whole file in alphabetical order, renumber the list, and make sure that MS excel doesn't screw up the dates. you see, in some parts of the world, dates are in this order : mm/dd/yy, whereas in malaysia its usually written in the format of dd/mm/yy. and after this list is done, i have to carefully extract 4 columns out and paste them into another file for the attendance list. and of course, there are the boxes that form the table, highlighting of parents who will be helping out during the 3 days, parents who are only going for the outing, and and kids who will be staying over.

now before you think i dislike doing this, let me tell you that it's not as bad as it seems. seriously. not when you have committee members who are there to help you laminate the name tags, burn the ends of the string so they don't fray, and help keep the typos in check. :)

plus, the kids can be really wonderful. the last 3 days of vbs has been quite an experience for me. personally, i never really liked the idea of handling kids, not when they start screaming for attention or cry for no apparent reason. the ones who were under my charge were pretty adorable. they look at you with dopey eyes and think you're some god. some demi-god who can take away their pain and answer all their questions. ok, maybe that was an exaggeration. but you know what i mean. they look up to you. and all of a sudden, you start acting all mature and responsible. LOL!

at the end of the 2nd day, when simone & i were winding down, we shared with each other about the antics of the children that day. she was sitting down with jayse, this 8-year-old girl, who showed her her "diary". in it jayse wrote about the day's events. there was also a page where she listed her favourite people. under the "favourite teachers" column, she wrote "teacher simone & teacher mee keng". i was like "aww, that's so sweet!" i never really considered myself a teacher of any sort, whatmore a children's teacher.

so i guess, children ain't that bad after all!