Camping, games and bouncy castles

On tuesday I spent the day with the new overseas boarders. We now have around 60 full-time boarders, and the new ones all seem to be really nice kids. They spent the morning in the ICT room making brochures about the local towns of Wells and Glastonbury, and learning that we do know when they've just copied and pasted the info straight from Google. In the afternoon they made key-rings in the creative design centre which was really cool!

That night I think everyone (both kids and staff) were so excited when we walked into the dining room to find a slushy machine! It was quite amusing watching all the kids drink it too fast and then pull faces from the brain freeze (having worked at Wendy's and having unlimited free slushies, I learnt very quickly how to avoid brain freeze, so I finished mine without pulling faces)

Wednesday morning I packed my bag for the year 7 camp. We left the school after lunch and drove for only 20 minutes before we arrived at the camp. I soon decided it's a lot more fun to be staff on camp than a student – you are the ones laughing at the kids falling off their rafts, and not the one falling off the raft.. We spent the afternoon wandering around the site looking at the activities the kids were doing (which all looked like so much fun!). Being staff also means there's no limit on the amount of marshmallows that you can toast on the fire (although i'm not too sure thats such a good thing because I probably ate around 50 that night...). Once the kids had all gone to bed we sat around the campfire for couple of hours, because of course the kids wouldn't go to sleep, so I didn't get to bed until 12.30am.. And then I was woken up at 6am by the kids singing happy birthday (as you can imagine I was not amused at all..)

I decided that camping around Australia when I was a kid was quite helpful, because I can put up, and take down tents really fast, although i'm not too sure that was such a good thing to reveal to the kids because I ended up putting up and taking down a lot of the tents, because apparently the majority of the kids had never been camping before..

Not a bad set-up for the night! Air mattress and everything - closest to glamping I've ever come!

On thursday after we got back from camp I had to put my rounders skills to the test (on minimal sleep). Because there always seems to be an odd number of girls I always seem to be the one to make the number even. So I had to do 20 minutes of throwing and catching rounders balls (and because i'm staff the kids don't make it easy for me..) I was diving all over the place, but thankfully I caught a lot more than I dropped!

That night I sat on the front field in the sunshine supervising the kids, and it is days like that that make me love my job so much!

Friday marked my 5 month anniversary at the school, and other then that, nothing really happened!

Saturday was an interesting day. I woke up at 4.45am, and by 5.45 I was on a minibus heading into London with some of the Spanish and french kids that were going to take their english exams. The reason that I needed to go with them was because one of the girls had tickets to a One Direction concert in Cardiff that night, but by the time the minibus was due to return it would have been too late. So I had to go in, and then once she had finished her exams, get a taxi from wimbledon to Paddington, and then the train to bath where she was picked up by one of the parents and driven to Cardiff. Thankfully I was able to scarper off while the kids sat their exams, so of course I went shopping (there's not a lot else to do in wimbledon when you cant play tennis apparently)

As you can imagine it was a really long day, but that didn't stop me from spending the evening out on the front field playing with the other members of staff. It's amazing how much entertainment three “adults” can get out of a tennis racquet and ball. We ended up hitting the ball as high as we could and then try to catch it (it's a lot harder then you would think, especially when the new Russian girl joins in and runs at the ball yelling..). even after that, when all the kids were in bed, we went on a Macca's run (of course) but by the time I was back and had finished my McFlurry, I was absolutely shattered!

The only problem with summer sunshine hours is that you have to be awake at  stupid hours of the morning to see the sunrise..

Proof that I was awake at that time of the morning on a Saturday!

Sunday was an amazing day. Firstly because the sun was shining, it was warm and I spent the entire day outside. Also it marked my being out of New Zealand for six months. I seriously can't get over how fast those months have flown by! Half of me feels like i've been here forever, I feel so at home here and I can't believe that it's only been 5 months at the school. But the other half of me feels like i've been out of New Zealand for a couple of weeks because it finally feels like summer here, and while I can understand winter being over the new year here, I can't seem to understand summer being in the middle of the year, so it quite often feels like January to me!.

Usually on Sundays I'm free from 11am till 5pm when the duty staff take charge of the kids. This weekend it was no different, but I didn't want to do anything other than sit on the front field with the duty staff, chatting and sharing stories. We had a bbq for lunch and it was so hot that I was wearing shorts and a loose top with my jandals (or flip-flops, whatever you want to call them..) and I was still hot! The activity for the kids was a summer party, and they had a bouncy castle obstacle course for the kids, but of course the “adults” had to give it a test run to make sure it was up to standard (and ohmygod it was! I can't remember the last time I went on one of those!) I tried to get a tan, and unsurprisingly failed, although I have lost the ghostly paleness that I have had for the last couple of years! And plus, it is only just summer so I have a while to work on it yet!

The kids had a water fight in the afternoon, but they were given strict instructions to stay away from us! I think it was the first water-fight that I have not been soaked in!

The rest of sunday was just like any other sunday, so there's not a lot to tell!

This was the only photo I took of the bouncy castle because my excitement got the better of me and i completely forgot about photos once it was completely inflated

And so we come back to Monday. For some strange reason I woke up really early this morning (7.20!) and so I spent three hours on Skype with my darling sister. I can't even remember the last time we skyped so there was a lot to catch up on! Other than that I haven't done a lot!

So I think that is all for this week! I mean it's not a week in Portugal, and you might not believe me on this, but I have enjoyed this week just as much as I enjoyed last week! It's amazing how much I love a job that I didn't know anything about when I first got here!

So until next week then...