Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday

Thursday; 9/8/2012; PRODUCTION!

Wow, what a day!! When I woke up in the morning, I felt like crap. But, I didn't have a fever, and was clinging to that. I made my way to school slowly and took the bus. Upon getting to school I was still slow moving, but because today was the full dress rehearsal for the production tonight, we didn't have a ton of planning to do. It was a relatively low key day until we got ready to actually go to production practice. I was in charge of all of the grade fours in our class, because our grade fours went with the five and sixes. 

So, at noon, I took ten of our kids to the bus and we drove out to a Secondary College, and waited there for about an hour while the same bus ferried back and forth between our school and the college to bring three sets of kids to the theatre. This, in itself, is a pretty tall order. 

Anyway, after the ridiculousness of everything with preparing for production, we eventually made our way back to school. Once we sent the kids off with parents, we just spent some time in the staff room until the Olympics came back on; then we went back into a classroom and watched the Olympics for a about an hour, before going to.

the.

production.

Although my school is pretty small for a P-6 primary school, the ENTIRE school in one production is pretty insane. Luckily our music teacher is absolutely amazing. 

Between trying to keep our kids quiet enough to be backstage, chasing one of my girls to make sure she didn't run on stage at any random time, and sending our whole grade out onto the stage too early, we made it. We all survived, even if only just. 

Teachers all went out to TGIFridays for dinner and drinks afterward which was great fun! :-D

Friday, 10/8/2012

Friday morning, EVERYONE was moving slowly. My host teacher also let me know that I would be taking over the whole classroom on Monday, because he would be gone all day. Monday will be a bit of a wonky day because a large portion of our kids will be gone at the District Athletics Competition (which is where my host teacher will be). 

Anyway, Friday was a bit of a wonky day as well, because everyone was recovering from the production (it went quite a bit later than most of the students are used to staying up). Coming home from school, I had to go pretty much straight to work in my room to get the video recorded for Dave's memorial service. Sam and I had talked before, and decided that the video should be about 3-4 minutes. Whoops - I apparently had a lot more to say than that because the video ended up being almost eight minutes long. However, I told Sam that it would have to be good enough, because I certainly wasn't going to do it again...

Fortunately, Melissa (another American exchange student) came to visit this weekend! She lives a few hours outside of Melbourne in the middle of nowhere, and so was glad to have some time with people and near the city. Friday night was nice and relaxed, eating pizza, having champagne. I taught Jo and Reigo how to play Farkle, and although they accused me of cheating....several times...we had fun:). Went to bed a tad early, because Saturday was going to be a big day (little did we know how big it would actually be...).

Saturday, 11/8/2012

Melissa, Kylen and I woke up relatively early so that we could go to head out to Lilydale to see another American student teacher, Kelsey, and we would all go to an animal park called the Healesville Sanctuary. For the past few days we had been unsure as to whether we would get to go, because it was supposed to dumb rain on Saturday. Fortunately, we ended up sticking it out and going anyway. All morning, there was virtually no rain. 

Kylen, Melissa, and I headed out to Lilydale around 9:45. We took the train out to Lilydale (about a half hour) to catch the 10:55 bus to the Sanctuary. 

Well, by the time we got there, we had a chance to go to the cafe and have some hot chocolate. We drank our hot chocolate (none of us really are interested in coffee - a fact which has astounded many Australians). We headed back to the bus stop and waited until about 11:00 before I decided to check the timetable. 10:55 was the bus on Sundays. The next bus out to the Sanctuary was at 11:40. we gave Kelsey some crap for misreading the timetable, and then headed to the shops across the street to wait inside for forty minutes. 

Fortunately, a surprise waited for us inside of the 'Coles'.

Not only had my phone begun to run out of minutes, so I needed to recharge it somewhere, but Kylen and I have been hunting for an elusive scarf. Down here, everyone and their mother has this yellow and green scarf, designed specifically for the Olympics. On one side it says "Go Aussies!" on the other "London 2012!". Kylen and I have seen them everywhere and have desperately been wanting one. Any and every store has been sold out, not had them on display, etc. It's been a serious frustration. But behold, when we walked into the Coles across the street, there lay our scarves, on sale for only two dollars!!!! We were so excited! We got our scarves, and headed back to the bus stop to catch our bus to the sanctuary.

Driving up we were taunted by the weather, going back and forth between sunshine and dumping rain the entire ride. We were getting nervous about whether we would actually get to see the animals or if they would all be hiding, out of the rain.

There were definitely some favorite animals when we got there, including the Koalas, Platypi, and Pelicans. Obviously the Kangaroos and Wallabees were awesome too, but those three were really where the excitement was for us. We went to see the Koalas almost immediately, and although they were mostly quietly and sneakily hidden in the trees, we got some cool pictures. One of which is below.

Whoops! That wasn't the actual Koala......

I apologize for the crick in your neck you may get from looking at this picture - but I think it's absolutely adorable! You can see a right side up picture on facebook if you want:)

Kelsey and Melissa REALLY loved the koalas:)

It was obviously me that was so freaking excited about the Platypi. 

When we finally got to the platypus thing, they are so freaking tiny!!!! They are absolutely adorable, and so freaking fast, so I didn't actually get a good picture of either of them. The best I got was a blur of dark ish shape in front of the light in the tank. :( It was a bit of a let down, but good to see them anyway. When I was in about first grade, I did a report on the duck-billed platypus, and I thought I was so cool. And I was. 

Next....the PELICANS. When we saw the pelicans, they were all congregated outside of the Wallabee enclosure, where we were coming out. We immediately thought of was Nigel from Finding Nemo. Nigel, however, was a nice pelican. These ones were not. 

They were so close to people, and just so incredibly relaxed around everyone, we decided to get some pictures. We each took pictures near the big birds. I tried to get closer, but one of them peered at me with it's creepy-ass yellow eye....

See? TERRIFYING.

Anyway, all of the sudden he turned his beak toward me and looked 'down his nose' at me. All of the sudden, he cracked!!!!!!!! This is not actually a photo I took, but this is what it looked like:

It was so terrifying, I'm relatively certain if I had had to pee, I wouldn't have any more after this moment. 

We also saw an incredible birds of prey show; incredible with eagles, hawks, parrots and cockatoos; many photos are available on my facebook, but right now, I think this post is getting too long, and I'm only a very short way through my whole weekend!