Day #34

Last night was the first night since I’ve been in Fort Hope that I haven’t slept particularly well. Perhaps it was a result of that nagging offbeat that I felt pulsating through my ‘yesterday’, or maybe it was the excitement of eating my white macaroni for lunch that kept me awake; whatever the reason, I didn’t sleep particularly well. I think that the biggest problem was that every time I woke myself up, I started trying to go back to sleep. I have become keenly aware of the drop in my performance as a human being when I lack sleep, so when I am lying in bed, trying to find my unconscious, I often get a little bit frustrated. Anyway, despite the fact that I lacked sleep when I woke up this morning, I still managed to shake myself awake with ‘Q’, oatmeal, fruit and Chai tea.

Soon after my breakfast I sauntered off towards the school, hoping for a relatively calm day. My morning was certainly calm enough, although it was this way because our numbers dropped dramatically in our 4-6 class. We were again down to 4 children this morning, which I blamed mostly on the fact that it was Monday. Nevertheless, we spent a productive morning working with our dedicated four. We made nature pictures with the flowers, grass, moss, sand and leaves that we had collected on last week’s nature walk, read ‘Alligator Baby’ by Robert Munsch (It was a crowd favourite, especially when I made my voice go up an octave for the mother’s screams), learned about the letter ‘M’, and played a couple of games. Hopefully we get a cavalry charge of 4-6 year old children tomorrow morning…If not, it will be back to the drawing board…again…haha…

At lunch, I posted off a couple of letters, one of which I wrote to the largely Spanish migrant workers that I had the pleasure of spending time with at the beginning of June. I’d promised to send a letter at some point in July, so I’m actually quite proud of myself for remembering!

The afternoon was also a bit of a disappointment as far as number of kids goes. I suppose I should stop characterizing these drops in numbers as disappointments, because at this point they are expected and no particularly surprising. Everyday we would love to have loads of kids, but in reality I think we realize that it isn’t always possible for this to happen. We just do our best everyday to make camp fun and enjoyable for our kids, and hope that words spreads and our numbers grow.

This afternoon I tried my first song lyric exercise with our 10 and 11s. I used ‘Where is the Love?’ by the Black Eyed Peas and actually managed to hold their attention for almost a half an hour. They were really into it. The only thing that I messed up was that I made the fill in the blank worksheet (I copied the lyrics down and then created a fill in the blanks for them to complete while listening to the song) way too difficult. There are a lot of tricky words in ‘Where is the Love?’ anyway, and I made it even harder by including far too many blanks. Oh well, you live and learn. Tomorrow I am using ‘Enter Sandman’ by Metallica. I had the kids write down their 3 favourite songs on a piece of paper and I drew one out as the lyric activity for tomorrow. This is how I ended up with ‘Enter Sandman’. The other notable thing that we did with the kids was start to create dream catchers. Last week Nanajean took us on a walk to collect the proper wood to create the loop for a dream catcher. Today we had to heat and soak the wood, as well as bend it into a ring shape. This seemed to interest the kids, so I’m really looking forward to working on my own alongside them tomorrow!

After camp I needed to collect myself a little bit, because I was starting to feel the effects of not sleeping well last night. I was rather exhausted, so I vegged out in front of my computer for a little bit, answering emails, checking my fantasy baseball league (which I still manage to lead) and bemoaning another close call for Mike Weir at the Canadian Open. We didn’t eat dinner until about 7pm tonight, but once we did I was ready to pound the pavement for another few hours. I strapped on my backpack, full of radio gear, and headed down to the radio station to do a show. I think that my show tonight was probably the best one that I’ve done so far. I still say ‘uh’ and ‘umm’ too much, but overall I think that I’m starting to improve just a little bit. One of the problems with the radio show is that I have to fill a good portion of the time talking about camp. Hopefully, if I can get out to do the show a bit more consistently this week, I can start to sprinkle in some other topics as well. That being said, as long as I get to talk for a bit and choose the music, I’m happy! I also think that I may have figured out a way to record the show to my computer’s hardrive. So, if all goes well, I will be able to start recording and perhaps posting (for those who are interested) the mp3s of my Fort Hope radio shows. Cross your fingers and hope that I remember how to set everything up again tomorrow or whenever I next do the show!

Alright, I apologize for the relative superficiality of this post, but I really have very little else to say tonight. I’m hoping to find some time over the next while to do a bit of writing on the side…Maybe a bit of poetry or some song lyrics, but for now, I’m going to pack it in and call it a night. I need sleep!