Buckle up readers, this is going to be a long one...

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Ladies and gentlemen, i am sooo sorry to have dropped the ball so badly.  It turns out when you are teaching all day, taking spanish classes every Monday and Wednesday night, taking masters classes every Tuesday and Thursday night and planning for everything in between...you get a little busy!  BUT I am back from being MIA and I have some stories to share with you all :)  So teaching has been every bit as exhausting as I have mentioned in the past and fortunately just as enjoyable as well.  My kids are soo amazing and I love every minute with them.  They are such fast learners and I seriously can't believe how well they are adapting to classes in english with me.  Some kids are making huge efforts to be able to talk to me in english and I feel completely blessed to have the opportunity to work with them.  There have been some awkward situations along the way but I guess that is just how I roll, know what I'm sayin??  Like about a week ago I called a woman that I am friends with here and when she picked up I guess she thought it was her boyfriend (she is about 70) and picked up and greeted me with a very erotic "Hello sex kitten, prrr prrrr".  Well I went ahead and laughed about this with my father for quite a while and he left me a voicemail on my computer making fun of the situation.  When you leave a voicemail on my computer it goes directly to my itunes so I can play it later.  Well not thinking any thing of it I was teaching a lesson and was showing my kids a clip of a lacrosse game off my itunes so we could talk about it and after the clip was over my dad's voice mail comes on and thru the surround sound speakers in the class of my private catholic school was my dad's voice saying "hello sex kitten, prrrr prrrrrr".  Awesome.  Laughter ensued and they were all trying to figure out why I had lied to them about not having a boyfriend.  To try to fix the problem I said "no no guys, that wasn't my boyfriend...that was my dad."  Whoops, hello awkward, nice to see you again.  Or in my class with my 12 and 13 year olds they are learning how to describe people and the teacher for them told me how excited they were to share an activity with me.  I stood in front of the class and one boy raised his hand, stood up, and said to me "Brenna, you have very big breasts."  "Thanks, Javi" I said, "Sit down please."  The next boy raised his hand, stood up, and said "Brenna, you have nice shapely legs." "Wow, Nacho, thanks for noticing.  Um, I feel uncomfortable, I'm going to sit down now.  I suggest you do the same." was all I could manage to say.  After about 20 minutes of the kids describing me I realized that they were given the sheet from above and were told to describe me.  After I sat down the teacher that gave this to the students and told them it was a little innappropriate his response was "But Brenna, the kids love you.  You are very sexy, they were very excited to describe you."  Let me be the first to tell you that the spanish have no idea what is and what isn't appropriate and clearly I am in no position to tell them otherwise.  After a complete day of feeling judged and slightly violated I spent the next few hours in class, came home, made dinner and worked out a lesson plan for the rest of the week that didn't involve words like "breasts" and "shapely legs" and I have to tell you, I am pretty sure they can describe most people without embarassing them now.  A job well done, Flynn.  After another long and crazy week, this past weekend Christina and I ventured to the Netherlands for a quick vacation.  When I say quick I mean it flew by.  We met some nice people on the plane and a guy from Madrid that was going to the same place we were so we took the train from Eindhoven to Amsterdam with him and parted ways, making sure we had plans to meet back up and fly home together since we were on the sam flight back.  We met up with a friend of mine and his teammate in Amsterdam and took a quick tour of the city.  Of course this included the red light district.  I must confess that I was a little uncomfortable with all the gadgets and women on display.  Call me old fashioned, but not only did those contraptions on display make me uncomfortable, but I was unaware that sex included so many objects that needed to be plugged in and woman that stand in front of a window for everyone to see when they walked by.  V to the omit.  I didn't mind leaving that place.  After a huge dinner of dutch pancakes my friend took us back to his place in Leeuwarden and we stayed with him for the next two nights.  It was so amazing and we didn't even accomplish that much.  It's weird that I had to travel to another country just to relax a bit and get some quiet time in but it worked and I loved every minute of it.  Obviously there was some craziness and we didn't leave Holland without a few crazy times full of booze, preverted comments, and nudity but I can assure you that none of this nonesense involved me and I was actually a very responsible, law abiding citizen during our stay.  After a whirlwind of a visit, my friend drove us back into Amsterdam, we took the train to Eindhoven where we met up with our buddy from the plane and waited with him for our flight.  We arrived in Madrid in one peice and ready for a good nap so we followed our friend to the metro where we found out he lived about 5 minutes from us, parted ways with dos besos (2 kisses) and called it a day.  When we came home we climbed into bed and napped the rest of the day.  Since it is a national Holiday here in Spain we had off school and classes on Monday and today so I am finally back to the grind of making lesson plans for the week, finishing up my homework and hopefully going to bed early so I can start the chump world of working yet again early tomorrow morning.