As everyone knows, it is Liam’s birthday in October and he is so accustomed to having a large group of friends over that he wasn’t coping very well when we restricted him to just two. We planned to go to the movies, but when there weren’t any appropriate ones, we changed the plan and let Liam have a few more friends over. They played X-Box and went down to the park to play football and soccer.
After the football, which the boys loved since they don’t usually all get together on the weekend to play, we went back to the house for Pizza and Chicken Wings.
Food was a bit of a disaster since so many of Liam’s friends cannot eat pork or pork products (its amazing how many innocous foods contain pork). We should have just had lots of nuggets and chips.
Bruce borrowed a projector and played a movie on the wall for the kids, which worked pretty well.
Liam mainly got presents relating to his X-Box, so that we can take them home and keep using them. He is now able to conncet to X-Box live and we will have to wait and see if this is a good thing or not.
On Friday, Oct 23rd, Bruce took the boys cricket team to Margaret Green Park to play against John Ross SHS and GCVI. The weather forecast was for 6°C and rain and we were not disappointed. Bruce stood out at square leg umpiring for the first game and was quietly getting frozen to the core. Some of the kids were in T-Shirts with light overshirts – I don’t know how they did it.
The kids are manic about their cricket, I was having an in-depth conversation with one of the Pakistani boys about whether it was a good idea for Ricky Ponting to drop himself from the one-day game. He was most upset that Australia beat them in the World Cup, I didn’t even know who won, but apparently we did.
We managed to get an hour in before it started to rain. Then Claire, one of the teachers from John Ross, collapsed with the cold, so we decided to call it all off. When Bruce got back to school he must have looked frozen since everyone suggested that he take a break from his next class and have a coffee to warm up.
It was interesting to see at the oval that they also had Aussie Rules goalposts set up and a sign saying it was the home of the Guelph AFL team.
Things are pretty hectic at school at the moment, with reports, parent nights and then reports again. Bruce can’t wait till Xmas and a bit of a break.
Liam had his first real Haloween this year. We thought he would be really excited about the whole affair, but unfortunately most of his friends didn’t seem to be very interested. If he had still been in Elementary School then the event would have started out by all the kids going to school in costumes on the Friday, but in Middle School the students are now “too old” to still get dressed up.
Fortunately Sam rang up on Saturday morning and invited Liam to come out with him. Liam got dressed up in his army gear (how unusual) and we went off to Sam’s. We then went over to Saf’s place and picked him up and the three boys then went Trick or Treating. It took them a while to pick up the signals about where you would have success and where you wouldn’t. The basic etiquette is that if you leave your porch light on then you are inviting kids in. Many people go to a lot more effort than this and decorate the whole porch and front yard. The really enthusiastic people get dressed in costume as well to give hand out the candy. Some parents have a little party with their small children and it is a family affair giving out the treats to the kids who knock on the door.
Liam had a great time and was so excited at the end of the night. In the car on the way back home he was telling Sam how great it was that his first Halloween was also the best he could have hoped for. We couldn’t believe the amount of treats that poured out of his bag at the end of the night. It was like trying to understand the TARDIS, the bag seemed so small but the contents were enormous. As you can see on the floor, he had over a hundred treats. You can see Sam has two bags full since we half emptied their bags when we got home before they did the houses around our area.
Rosie also had a great night, waiting at home for all the little kids to come around. She was a bit apprehensive at first since no one came, but then the rush from about 6:45 till 7:45 kept her very busy and entertained. All up a true North American experience.
