last day at sea on the Veendam!

May 27, 2013: sea day
Sea days are really long when the ages are combined and there’s such a large gap in the age range. We have a 5-year-old, a 6-year-old and then 10, 11, 12-year olds. The 5-year-old was the first to show up this morning. He got frustrated with Wii about the time we were scheduled to change activities anyway. I had him and the tween that just arrived make their craft folder and we did name art before the others got there. We played Spoons and Squirt until I finally could close for lunch. The kid was having a very hard time understanding that you have to pass cards in Spoons and that you have to watch what is actually going on in Squirt. I keep thinking he’s younger than he is because he acts so much younger than the three-year-old we had last week!

This afternoon started with Skip-Bo with just the tweens. Then it got hectic because the kids came and were upset because we weren’t playing MarioKart at all this afternoon. I had to come up with a few quick activities because we didn’t have enough wrapping paper (and time to wrap something) to play “pass the parcel” and the Sports Deck was wet which meant we couldn’t go outside. Instead, they made their “All About Me” sheets (I wrote for the two little ones) and everyone who hadn’t already made their craft folders did that.

The tweens were there right at 7 and we enjoyed free time together before I let them have snack. The two kids came right after snack and immediately went to play MarioKart. Luckily, I’d thought about that beforehand and had already locked up the remotes just in case. They were upset about that, but it WAS theme night time, not free time. Anyway, one of the kids didn’t want to participate at all in our theme night, so he played with the kitchen and pirate ships while the rest of them made their Spy name tags, Spy ID cards, and figured out Chinese numbers. I had to help the other kid a lot, but the tweens helped me a bit with that too. When we started to make our spy gadgets out of random materials I’d collected from our supply closet, the other kid wanted to join, so I added him to a team and everyone ended up working separately on their own gadget. That was okay though, because it took a long time for them to finish, and then a while for them to present their gadgets to the groups, so there were only three tweens left to kill 15 minutes with! I miss working with only tweens!