Friday the 13th was a great, if busy, day for the A-team. Alanna had the Charlottes--Charlotte K and Charlotte P, who live on the same street and last year were in the same class--sleep over the night before. When they woke up, we had bagels all around for breakfast and the girls watched Chipwrecked, which Gram sent us for Easter. It was a great week for packages. In addition to Gram's package of movies and books, we also got some Clif Z-bars from Nana. Thank you both sooo much! A few hours later, we had Aliya's Zumba party. Zumba, for the uninitiated, is a Latin-style dance exercise class. She'd been wanting to do this for the past six months, ever since she went to a Kids Zumba exercise class at my gym. So, earlier in the week I sent an e-mail to a bunch of her friends to see who might be interested and available to come to the party.
Fortunately, the party required very little preparation. I downloaded a few songs and we created a playlist with some official Zumba songs, some songs that were just fun to dance to, plus Limbo Rock and the Hokey Pokey. I cut up a bunch of veggies and fruit, and set out some Cheezels (similar to puffy Cheetos) and pretzels. Pushed back the furniture, and we were good to go.
Eight children showed up at 1:00, and the place got loud! Aliya was looking forward to being the teacher. She petitioned for a stage to be built, but we decided that wasn't necessary. And once the song started, she got a bit shy. Fortunately the other girls were good sports about it and they all had fun dancing.
After a few songs, we switched to some party games. Limbo was a huge hit. Then it was on to the snacks. The kids loaded up their plates and sat at the table. We played more games around the table, including "Chinese Whispers" aka Telephone. Next up was, "I went to the shops and I bought an avocado, a baby, a cricket" where each person repeats what the previous person bought then adds another item. I had to laugh at Alanna's "i" item, which was "an insane footy team." We also went around the table making up a story, where each person adds another sentence. Aliya started it off with a sentence about a magic treehouse. You can guess what books she's been reading lately. Halfway through, another girl added something about a leprechaun. Oddly enough, we played this same game camping in Ballarat last weekend, and I added a leprechaun too (although actually I said leprecorn, which I decided was a combination of leprechaun and unicorn..but I digress...) When they'd had enough snacks, it was time for more dancing and more games. About 2:30 we reached a lull, and I desperately looked around, trying to think of another good party game. I spotted a large bag of chocolate Easter Eggs on our counter, and decided to do egg/spoon relay race. That was a huge success, and from there we just did various variations on the relay race, right up until the moms started to arrive.
Later that afternoon, we headed to our friend's house to do another Easter Egg hunt with the families that camped with us in Ballarat last weekend. (I will blog about that, just waiting for the group pictures!) The cold and rainy weather prevented us from doing our own hunt, so we decided to do it today. As soon as the kids arrived, they all headed out to the trampoline and started playing the circle games they'd played while camping.
We brought them back inside so we could hide the eggs. In addition to the chocolate eggs, I had a bunch of the plastic colored eggs filled with assorted little toys and stickers that we'd brought over from the US. The Aussies had never seen them (they don't sell plastic eggs here) and thought it was nice to have something other than just chocolate. Some of the kids liked the toys, but one boy only wanted candy and exchanged his plastic ones for "real" eggs! We told them no egg hunt until we got a group picture:
Let the hunt begin. It was a beautiful day for it, much nicer than the weather we had last weekend.
That evening we watched a major footy game (Aussie rules football.) It was a hugely-anticipated match up: the Collingwood Magpies vs the Carlton Blues. They've been rivals for over 100 years! A bit of a rivalry in our family as well:
During the game they made homemade signs and pompoms. Alanna put a number four on her shirt, the number of the Collingwood team captain.
Unfortunately for Alanna, the Magpies lost by 60 points, ouch! Still early in the season though :-) We've really been enjoying the two week term break. This past week their friends back home in Cali have been on Spring Break as well, which has made it much easier for them to connect each other. They really enjoy staying in touch with and chatting with their friends, and often it's hard to do with the time difference and busy schedules. They've spent a lot of time this week on Skype and Facetime, even "texting" with messages on their iTouches. Gotta love technology...Even as I write this Alanna is on Facetime (is Facetiming a verb?) with Patrick. A few days ago she was on Facetime with her friend Ben, and I heard him say, I'll show you mine and then you can show me yours. Of course, they were talking about their progress on a game they were playing.
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