first half of my last week

July 22, 2012
Jessica had an early morning with her immigration meeting so we got off the ship late, around noon. We found a taxi and rode to the mall to buy some decent uniform pieces. I now have a shirt that actually fits and a navy sweater to go over it so I don’t have to be florescent orange anymore! The shirts we bought are more orange than the real ones, but it doesn’t really matter, especially since they’re still orange and mostly covered up by the navy. We had lunch at Subway too, so two very good things already today!
We met Shannon, Iris and Brian this afternoon. Shannon seems quiet, I can tell we’re probably going to get along really well. Iris has done this before; she’s taking over as YPC in 2 weeks when Megan leaves, and she’s a friend of Ashley’s so we should get along well. I haven’t really spoken to Brian much so we’ll see, I think this is his first contract and he’s older than us. When Megan introduced me to Iris and Brian, she kind of bragged about how well I did with the teens last week. Oh, speaking of my teens, the $40 tip I got, Megan said I could keep it for myself since I was alone in working with the teens all week. Awesome!
Jessica went to the Bow to talk on the phone for a bit, then decided to visit Steven and the band as they played by the Lido pool. We ended up getting a plate of fries because we’re starting to get hungry again. Maybe this is like camp; I’ll come home and constantly be hungry. Now we’re back in the room for an hour hanging out before dinner. It’ll be an interesting evening because I’m not sure I really remember what activities the tweens do on the first night!
July 23, 2012
Last night was pretty crazy. I’m not even sure how many kids we had, they kept changing out and I had little time to get to know their names. We did the normal stuff: All About you posters, contract of fun, silent speedball, and a question game. I think the All about you posters took up the most time because some of them got really into decorating, while some of them were not interested at all. Shannon helped out and I tried to teach her the ways of the tween room.
We actually had breakfast as a youth staff this morning! First time everyone has sat together since I’ve been here. I feel like this group gets along well; we can hang out with each other outside of work, which is nice especially since it’s my last week. Shannon had to do new-crew stuff this morning so I was in charge of the tweens all by myself (with some assistance from Megan when she came by) for the first two hours. I think it was okay. They really wanted to play on the wii and not do activities, so I ended up having to make them do stuff; after a while they started to see that the activities we were doing were fun. Some of them didn’t want to leave for lunch once they finally got into what we were doing.
I had lunch with the youth staff (whoa, two meals in one day!) and Jenn. Lunch was rather disappointing to me, there weren’t any good entrees, and when I went to get pasta, they didn’t have alfredo sauce. So, I ended up getting pizza; pizza had hot dogs on it for some reason. I did end up getting strawberries (they gave me a lot thankfully) and cutting them up to put them in ice cream. That was a brilliant idea!
I hung out in the room with Jessica for a while before heading back to the tween room. They love our free time, especially playing on the x boxes. Some of the kids were a bit frustrating today; they didn’t want to listen at all, and signed in only to immediately ask to go back inside because we were outside playing basketball. But, they all ended up figuring out that they had to stay with the group. They absolutely love playing Silent Speedball, though they don’t really get the “silent” part of it. At least they’re looking forward to Spy Night tonight!
It’s formal night and hour back night!
July 24, 2012
Last night was definitely interesting. I have no idea how much the tweens enjoyed the activities. They just talk and goof off the whole time instead of really listening to my instructions or considering the fact that they might have fun. Well, they got into the scavenger hunt part, but not really anything else. It’s hard because I have quite a few who only just turned 8 and then a few who turn13 in a few weeks, so it’s kind of a wider age gap than we’ve had in the past. My kids really aren’t that good at being secretive either; spy night should mean that you be sneaky and don’t let others know what you’re doing, but shouting out answers and the key to certain activities was a common occurrence. I didn’t feel like they cared at all about letting others figure out things on their own. We tried to play “johnny whoop,” a game where you join the johnny club by doing exactly what I did, usually the focus is on something specific, but what I do at the very end is overlooked; some already knew the answers and immediately started doing the last thing over and over, giving away the secret to others and talking over me.
I did make it through the night though, by the end they finally started to listen to me just a bit; granted, the game I showed them dealt with listening to figure out whether to answer yes or no to questions. No one already knew that game so I at least kept them interested for a while.
After closing, Shannon and I changed and went to the show. It was a different show this week, Broadway songs instead of the normal singing and dancing.
Afternoon:
This morning went alright, we had a few new kids register so it was a slightly different group. Some of the louder ones were not there so we actually managed to get through each of our activities on time! Nothing too exciting happened, which is a good thing when working with kids because exciting likely means something bad happened. Although, a mother was kind of upset when she picked up her son because something happened that we didn’t know about and her son didn’t tell us. She was more frustrated with him not telling us though. This afternoon we had a talk with all of the kids and made sure they understand the rules of bullying and video game privileges.
The tweens did bring jackets this morning so were happy to be outside playing tag. Gaga ball inside was, once again, a huge hit. The tweens love hitting that giant tennis ball around for some reason, it’s a crazy game but at least they’re happily occupied. Most of them came with us to the Cooking Class (cheese pretzels again), so that was pretty cool.
This afternoon, Shannon and I went looking for music and sat with some soda for a while until we started to realize that we were close to the glacier. So, I ran upstairs and grabbed my DSLR so I could get some really good pictures of it! I took about 150 in the time we were around the glacier. We saw lots of seals on the ice, which were the main subjects of my photos. We stayed out until we were too far away from the glacier, and it happened to be about dinnertime.
Brave the Night was okay, it wasn’t nearly as successful as I’d hoped it would be. The kids did listen to what I said most of the time, especially after out talk this afternoon. However, the activities took a lot longer than I remember them taking during my first two weeks. We barely made it through the ones I remembered. Our numbers kept going down as well because a lot of families have an early excursion. Jessica and I started laundry and it’s taking forever to finish. I hope it’s done soon because I have to work at 8 tomorrow. Juneau finally, that means I can post all I’ve typed lately.
Oh, and 5 days until I’m back home where there’s normal internet! I really wish it would just connect in my room, it’d make my life so much easier and I’d be able to stay in contact without sacrificing excursion time.