I love the potential in kids. They are so innocent and beautiful and untouched, and such smart creatures.

I love the pictures they draw me, the hugs they give me, the fact that they remember my name.

I love that they have grown accustomed to me and have known me to be familiar; I enjoy being someone consistent in their lives, someone they recognize and look up to. I like being a part of a kind of family outside of family.

When some of the more troublesome kids see me, there's this glimmer, this change in stature, and smile that escapes from their lips. There's this one specific little boy whom I was really hard on him the first time I had to deal with his attitude and disinterest in doing homework, so thereafter he warmed up to me..we have funny interactions.

Sometimes there's so much energy in the air that it is overwhelming, and I start feeling like I am suffocating. The screaming and the chaos that surrounds me drowns me out, almost like I am drowning in it, and we become this one giant mass. But the energy, you see, can be used for so many things that it is endless. Endless potential.

I love how lovely and simple they are. Their innocence is so sweet and makes me smile from a place so deeply inside, because it permeates not just what they feel and say, but how they think and see the world. On one particular pizza day, it was a little boy's first. After signing his and his sister's name off the list, he stared at his pizza and showed us how we could slice the pizza to have a share for both himself and his sister. Smiling, we assured him that she had her own serving, too. Sweet innocence..spilling over.