Week 16

The countdown begins:
Two more weeks left until Christmas break!

One more week until we sail to Tenerife!

This week we wrapped up our 'Helping Hands' unit by taking thank you cards around to some of the community helpers here on our ship. Each child picked a department that they wanted to give a card to, decorated it and then we all signed it. I thought this would be a nice way to tell the people who help us that we appreciate all their hard work. On Friday, we spent about 45 minutes taking the cards all over the ship. We had cards for the crew clinic (doctors), the nurses, reception, galley, teachers, post office, the captain, the firefighters and the Gurkhas (security guards on our ship).

As we get ready to sail, we have also started to have 'at sea' musters. Usually we have a muster (ie. a fire drill) every other Thursday - and usually after school. When the alarm goes, we all leave the ship, go down to the dock each group checks to make sure that everyone has made it. For sailing, there is no dock :) so we have to go to Deck 7 where the lifeboats are. We also get to wear super cool bright orange life jackets for the drills. Most adults are pretty good about this, but some of the kids, especially the young ones, really have trouble with the jackets. This past week in preschool, I got permission to get the life jackets out and practice with them a little. I think this helps to take some of the fear out the crazy drills with loud alarms and gets people excited for sailing. The pictures below are from when preschool tried on the jackets and also the all ship drill that we had on Thursday.

Soon, we will be leaving Liberia, which means we will also be leaving behind the great dock that God has blessed us with the past few years. Although it can be warm some days, the dock that we have right now has become a great place to play, draw chalk pictures, rides bikes and feed the fish. This past week we had some new experiences on the dock. One day, some of the girls discovered that if you draw enough in a puddle, chalk becomes a nice paste that you can fingerpaint with. Luckily, hands were the only thing that got covered in the new 'chalk paint.' Another day we took out the hula hoops, which we have done before, but this time lost two into the water. Ooops. One was fished out by a day worker when it came close enough to the ship, but the other has floated off to a new life in Liberia. It was a bit like a math problem 'The preschool class had 12 hula hoops. Two went into the water but one was fished out again. How many hula hoops do they have now?'