sea day

July 19, 2013: Sea day
Just another day at sea. I wonder how many days I’ve spent at sea by now. 4 a cruise on the Zuiderdam, quite a lot on the Maasdam, around 8 on the Oosterdam, 5 on the Veendam… Anyway, sea days never really change: working 9-11:30, 1-4 and 7-10. Hardly enough time between sessions to do anything.

It was a pretty quiet morning at first with only 3 kids there, for all three English is not their 1st language. After our first 4 activities, another few kids came in and it got a bit more hectic, suddenly none of them wanted to do the activities planned.

We tried to avoid going to the Sports Deck in the afternoon, but our numbers kept increasing so we ended up having to go up. It was extremely hot out, with hardly any wind to help cool it off. After about 15 minutes, half the group was sitting on the sidelines watching and waiting for time to go back in for water and ice cream. Going to the lido with 11 little kids is a bit frustrating I discovered. I stayed with them and started to get waters for them all while April took orders and then went to get the ice cream. They didn’t seem to understand that I couldn’t fill up the glasses any quicker, so they had to wait to get water, then they had to wait to get seconds of water until everyone had a glass. Then April came with half the ice creams and went to go get the rest and I had to deal with some complaining that April only brought vanilla. I was happy when we finally got everything sorted out and they all stopped asking me for everything. It was a very long afternoon

The good thing about today was that it was movie night! We made a movies poster for them to color during free time, then we passed out popcorn before starting Brave. We had a few accidents with spilling bags of popcorn and half-full cups of water so had to stop the movie a few times. After a while they seemed to get bored of the movie and kept talking, and walking around. We had to stop the movie for a few minutes then to get everyone calmed down again. At least it was calmer than this afternoon