Vacation From My Vacation

I was talking to my friend, Nancy, the other day and she pointed out that all of our little trips we take are basically vacations from our vacation. That's when I decided that I love my life :)

Here are some of my cute kids!

Selwyn and Benjamin: Selwyn is not the best behaved but I have the hardest time saying no to those dimples. You can hardly understand a word he says because of some sort of speech impediment or something (it's almost like he mumbles to an extreme) so he does plenty of talking with his eyebrows! Benjamin had head trauma (that's what they refer to it as) when he was younger so he is in our class but there is a teacher aid glued to his side all day, even while playing outside. I wish he was showing his teeth because he is so cute without his two front teeth!

Our school has Swimming Sports this week, aka a school wide swim meet which was so exciting! The kids have swimming 3 times a week (I get in with them, so fun!) and we work on things like blowing bubbles and using kick boards, so they just did short races against kids their age such as "running" in the water for a short distance. So fun! From front to back of the line: Sam, Selwyn, someone not in my class, and Chance (Chance is the one white boy in my class whose entire name I can say). The girl with the long braid on the side is Alexis who I live with- check out that hair!

Some of the Room 21 girls before their big race! From front to back of the line again: Faith (as opposed to another girl who used to be in our class Phayth, pronounced the same), Alondra, Italy ("like the country"), Mariayah, Ana, and Kyara.

This is the most quoted LEVI that I have blogged so much about. He is the youngest in my class (started school last October, everyone starts on their 5th birthday) and he is just so funny. Here he wouldn't smile because he was distraught over his lost shirt after swimming sports. We never did find it, eh.

Some more "Why I Teach..." moments (I realize they're probably more entertaining to me cause you may have needed to be there/ hear their accent/ know them so feel free to skip over this part):

Ana brings in a pterodactyl for show and tell and talks all about it with some impressive facts, and said they lived "ages and ages ago, like real old" then Levi chimed in: Ummmm they were actually around in the 80's, not the 50's. (Mind you she hadn't mentioned anything about the 50's but I'm glad to see you've got your thinking cap on, Levi)

We were talking about what we wanted to be when we grew up and last time we talked about it Ana told me she was going to be an "acrobatic" (not acrobat, they corrected me) but this time: I'm going to be a really famous artist when I'm a grown up. I'm already kind of a famous artist because I have drawn heaps of beautiful pictures. I'm also a famous dancer right now.

Alondra showed the class a picture from when she was little and Mariayah asked: when were you little?

Hey, at least it was a question instead of a statement this time, right Mariayah? (they are learning the difference between questions and statements at the moment)

Me: We're going to sing now. You're a pretty good singer, right? (He had explained before how good he was and that he would be famous one day)

Levi: Yeah, I'm a GOOD-AS singer! I'll sing anything you want right now. What should I sing? (in a very bring-it type of tone) (they add AS to everything, not the a-word as I thought when I first got here, sweet-as, good-as, cool-as, big-as...)

Benjamin: Good morning Room 21.

Class: Good morning Benjamin (standard procedure for oral language practice/ show and tell)

Benjamin: This is my hankie. You go like this **blows his nose**

I thought it was very informative.

This weekend we went away to Hot Water Beach on the Coromandel Penninsula. We rented some beach houses and stayed Thursday and Friday night. We sat on the deck watching the waves, star gazed, watched the sunrise, and played on the beach!

So this place is bizarre. On this one spot on the beach, you wait for the tide to go out and dig holes to make little hot tubs! The water that comes up is super hot, we even had to bring in buckets from the ocean at some spots cause it was too hot. It has something to do with volcanoes and carbon dioxide or something, but it is the strangest/ coolest thing! Nancy and I were holding down our spot while we waiting for the tide to go out- this spot was so hot that we were basically dancing the whole time so as not to burn our feet!

We were the only people on the beach all morning, but it looked like this for a good 4 hours, then every desserted once the tide came back in. The advice we were given before finding a spot to dig was "Be aggressive!" because the people are so crazy :)

On Saturday we went by Cathedral Cove on the way home which is another Narnia filming spot that is beautiful. Unfortunately we couldn't actually go down to the cove because of the rainy season, but we went down some crazy muddy paths (slid down is probably more accurate) and climb around rocks to get a good view from outside of the cove. The pictures are on another camera so stayed tuned for those on facebook later or something. Here I am with Neeley and Whitney heading down to the cove!