Yay for home

I have been looking forward to certain things about arriving home. Some of it being seeing people I haven't seen for a long time, but most of it is doing things I haven't done for a long time.

I have lain on mums bed under a fan, I have gone to a 50m pool and swam laps (not many), today I went to the beach with my brother and sister and on Thursday I will go and get a milkshake from the blood bank (you get them for free if you give blood).

The pool is novel, usually where I have lived for the last 2 years the pool is 25m which means that if your kick off is say 8m then you only have like 8 strokes or 10 before you turn and kick off again. That makes a km of swimming easier then in a 50m pool.

The beach, I live right near a beach in WA however, as mentioned in an earlier blog, the waves are not very dramatic. they have been known to wet your ankles. I have seen it so flat there that the only waves were the ripples made by kids splashing around. In contrast the beach today was rough and big and constant. It was worse then I would normally swim in and we had to go quite a long way out to get past the breakers. Once we did though it was worth it. You would go rushing up a wall of water and then fall down the 2m drop on the other side. Sometimes, with a kick or push off the ground it felt like I got air time. I was quite out of practice and there was a certain amount of flapping and floundering after some of the biggest waves.

On Thursday I am going to donate plasma, which is like donating blood but takes longer so take a book. There are a few reasons I do this but the biggest one is the free milk shake we get afterwards. This means that when no milkshake is forthcoming I get a little bit put out.

I would also like to go to the barrington tops, the blue mountains (summer school) and beach mission (without a beach)

Coming Back

Having not seen the children I care for for two and a half weeks, there has needed to be a brief getting to know you period. This is when we are polite and kind but distant and cautious. Is Julia the same person we remember? Will she be happy to see us? Will we get into lots of trouble?

There would also have been a degree of uncertainty about whether I was coming back. I knew I was coming back, their mother knew I was coming back (I left half my stuff here) but the children have had so many people come, stay for 3 months, then leave and a new random person arrives.

I wrote a little not to the eldest boy before I left telling him I loved him and I would come back on this particular day. Today he showed me the note, still stuck to his bed head.

Exciting moments

We took the Labrador puppy down to the dam to teach her to swim. Everything was going swimmingly but she did not seem to be very confident at it. She can do it but she is not really a huge fan.

When she would go in to get a stick, she would wade in and when it got to nearly her chin she would do a funny little jump. This pushed the stick out of reach. She did this a couple of times until she got the stick. She had thus far only gotten the stick while standing, the effort of plunging valiantly made her sink under the water. We all went "oh look" the OH LOOK!!!", she came up just as I was going to grab her. This appeared to shake her confidence because she did not go out of her depth again.

When we had all gotten out to dry off and go home, one of the kids yelled "snake, JULIA, just behind you!!!!" I looked down in time to see a snake slide between my feet towards the water. We left after that and I considered that it is the kind of excitement we did not really need.