Alas, I am a girl who gets excited by handbags.

So I have decided that in the coming weeks I am going to share with you my amazing collection of Rubik’s cubes and Rubik’s cube related paraphernalia. This idea was sparked when I received possibly the coolest gift ever- a Rubik’s cube handbag! It is perfect! The feature I like most about it is the fact that I can easily fit a Rubik’s cube in there and it doesn’t bulge out at a terrible angle, like it would with nearly every other handbag. Sandra and Elizabeth gave it to me for my birthday last night and it was by far my favourite part of the evening (this is saying something because the food was exquisite!)

I wish that I had Jessie's Girl.

do you want to watch a video that makes me happy and will make you laugh? Its of a group of year 11 students who are acting out Rick Springfield's video clip to 'Jessies girl.' Im sure they had a swell time making it and the person in charge of the well organised shenanigans will most likely become a famous directer one day. I hope so anyway. My favourite part is 3.05.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xICm-zg-i0s

The adventures of Cel and the Eski Kids Part 2

Morning:

Why did I think it was a good idea to go exploring with 12 kids in caves and around cliffs? I don’t think my heart rate has stayed so elevated for such an extended period of time. The worst moment was when, led by me, 12 students entered the cave and after climbing out a different exit, I could only count 11 students. By golly I thought I had screwed up bigtime! Turns out one of the kids up the back was feeling ill and so she and a parent told Barry that they weren’t going into the cave. Here was me thinking they’d climbed in a cubby hole and quietly fallen off a cliff.

But its all good. Everyone survived and no-one lost their looking after kids privileges.

Afternoon:

Enter the most determined child ever! The surprising thing about today’s subject is the fact that she is a girl. I am rarely inspired by primary school girls. She was loud and vastly annoying. So how it happened was this:
Dave and I are chilling at the top of the abseiling tower letting kids off when she came shaking her way through the cubby hole bawling her eyes out. She was TERRIFIED! It took a decent 5 minutes to get her off the ladder and sitting on the platform floor. And then finally finally we get her to stand up. Dave is being sooo encouraging and trying to get her to let go of the metal bar she was clinging to. She wasn’t having a bar of it (haha get it?) so she would let go for 2 seconds and grasp it again. Dave was very patient. Because there was no chance of her stepping away from the bar Dave finally said “you have done so well but given that you aren’t comfortable letting go of the bar I think we will have to be happy with how far you have gotten and maybe give abseiling a miss.” As soon as he said that she completely let go of the bar and looked at ease without it. Dave was shocked and agreed to keep going with her attempt to abseil. The second he agreed to keep going she clung back onto the bar for dear life. She was shit scared and more determined to abseil than anyone else I’ve ever seen.

The whole time we were coaxing her off the edge she didn’t make a fuss or try to climb back in, she just slowly went through the paces. Everytime she got overwhelmed and started getting sewing machine legs she would take a deep breath and calm down and keep going.

When she was halfway down the wall she was grinning like a Cheshire cat and was so pleased at having conquered her fears.

All I can say about this girl (other than all the other stuff I just said about her) is woe betide anyone who attempts to get in the way of her achieving what she has set her mind to.

I have the warm shiny feeling of having just been inspired.

The Adventures of Cel and the Eski Kids Part 1

This week marks the first week that I am group teacher, which means I am in charge of Kids for the whole camp!

I started the week out on a hefty 14 hours sleep. ‘14 hours??’ I hear you whisper, ‘how is it possible to sleep for 14 hours and get to work on time?’ Well I’ll let you in on the secret. Firstly you get 5 hours sleep on Friday and Saturday night, then you wake up early and go to church, then you go exploring in the warby ranges with your friends, then you come home, scream at you mother unnecessarily, storm to your room and throw yourself on the bed, contemplate getting up to yell some more and then fall asleep until the next morning.

Getting back to teaching though: I realised, when I was leading these kids around that despite me learning this year that primary school children aren’t evil soul sucking parasites I still don’t want to ever be a primary school teacher. One on one kids are alright but as a group they just stare at me blankly because apparently I use far too many big words. Maybe I’ll work with babies when I am older, that way I can use big words and they won’t know the difference.

So our first activity was flying fox. I was up the top hooking kids in for my first time. I tell you, the only thing more exhilarating than jumping off a cliff whilst attached to a flying fox is throwing someone else’s child off a cliff after attaching them to a flying fox. I swear after every kid jumped my heart skipped a beat and my head screamed “you didn’t attach them properly!!” But it’s ok because they all survived.

While I was attaching them I heard two gems of wisdom relating to fear. The first one was “My Mum told me that if you don’t jump off a cliff then you will never face your fears.” The second was far more succinct and slightly less coherent “If you have no fear then you can eat deer.”

This led me to believe that I must have fear because I haven’t gone near deer since the traumatic deer pancake incident of 2002.

Anyway, that is all for today. Tune in tomorrow for caving and climbing.

Moves like Jagger

I went for a joy ride to The Cathedrals today. This weekend was my assessment bushwalk for tafe and to be perfectly honest I was dreading it. Well, not dreading the walk so much, but the pre-walk assignment and the logistics of packing. I HATE packing for bushwalking. So im all set to go, I’ve had my ankle strapped and Im beginning to be excited about the walk. So the night before the walk (last night) I wake up in the middle of the night with my foot cranking sore. Next morning I get up and go and on the drive there my foot hurt so much that I was crying while I drived. (and yelling and wailing because there was no-one else around so I felt at liberty to do so.) When I got to base I talked to my trainer and he said that I couldn’t go if I couldn’t walk on it and I shouldn’t walk on it without tape because there is too much risk of re-injuring myself and doing more damage. And then he sent me home. HE sent me home. I think I am feeling a teeny tiny bit guilty about not doing the walk because of my grievances towards it previously in the week.  So essentially I just drove a 4 ½ hour round trip to hang out with my TAFE buddies. They’re cool so it was worth it, but I’m bummed I can’t spend the weekend with them.

Also, Listening to the radio for four hours straight makes me realise just how frequently they play ‘moves like Jagger’ by Maroon 5. After the fourth rendition I fear that it has permanently imprinted itself on my brain.

…

I got my 18 for a year blog final piece printed off. It looks so cool! I am very happy with it!

Im a firefighter.

The thing about working with primary school kids is this: Sometimes, just sometimes, they are the cutest little creatures on earth! Cuter than poodle puppies.

The other day I was belaying kids up and down the rock wall at work. I was on one side and the visiting teacher was belaying on the other side. This one kid, lets call him Hayden*, was climbing up the wall. He was smashing it and was keen as mustard when, just near the top, he made the fatal mistake of looking down. It was all over. He was stuck to that wall like someone got loose with the hot glue gun. His teacher tried getting him down by yelling at him (do teachers seriously think this will work? Why do you go to teachers college if not to learn DON’T yell at a kid who is already crapping himself?). So then I had a go coaxing him to trust the rope, alas that was also to no avail. So the Amy had a shot talking to him from the top of the tower. Nothing would work. So its what happened next that was the cute bit..
Owen came and belayed me while I climbing up the wall over to him. When I got there I told him the he was safe and that we were going to go down together. So he sat on my knee and I wrapped my arms around him and we got lowered to the ground together. When he got to the bottom I gave him a big hug (yeah its against the rules, whatchya gonna do about it?) and untied him and he calmed down.

This whole kerfuffle made me feel really happy because, even though all I had done was rescue this kid from his self constructed psychological stranglehold he thought I had saved his life. It’s a nice feeling having someone think that you’ve saved their life. I think I might become a firefighter.

*not necessarily his real name

You haven't seen the last of me.

Ok, I’m addicted. The difference between this Blog and the last (www.cecelia-18.blogspot.com) is this time there are absolutely no rules. I fail to see why people are interested in my day to day life but they seem to be and I love talking and creating records of life, so having a blog allows me to do both of those things.