Shortly after 9 we all went up to the Foundations land to carry on clearing the overgrowth.

Emilie pitched in with the kids, clearing the straw already strimmed earlier in the week, whilst Tai took over strimming duty again.

With the heat of the day increasing we called it a day a at around 10.30. Tai however insisted on staying on with the strimmer.  Leaving Zak with him we allowed him to carry on whilst we took the others home.

I returned shortly after and was amazed at the amount he had got done and he wouldn’t stop until shortly before midday.

I’m very grateful for that extra effort as it reduces the amount left for me to finish over the next couple of days.

Back home, after lunch Emilie interacted with the children in a variety of games and activities, using the opportunity to encourage the children to practice their English language skills through play.

The children’s daily duties were not neglected either and they even found time to change the fish pond water.

Super Sunday

I had already been working on ideas for such a project and the children had already been practising some short phrases in English to use to describe what goes on here.

This Saturday Oscar paid his second visit, this time arriving with his impressive looking camera. Oscar clearly knows what he’s doing and took time to break the ice with the kids before getting them to “try out” for the video. They all did very well after overcoming initial shyness and confidence problems. Oscar spent the whole afternoon here, observing, chatting and playing with the kids in between getting some useful clips of the kids at play and also some short interviews with them chatting freely in Thai language.

During his visit the kids alerted us to another visitor, one of the beautiful local giant moths.

Oscar will be paying several visits in the near future getting the necessary shots for the finished project.

Thanks a lot Oscar, can’t wait to see the finished product.

The girls and Jack all took to making dens out of bamboo sticks and banana leaves, and a great job they did too.

Gu, with a little help from myself, set to making new stilts and then practising walking on them. Indeed most of the children took a turn on them later on, with the older children assisting the younger ones for safety.

Tai spent a long time practising on his guitar today and is progressing rapidly.

And today was a mix of continued work on the Murals, cheerful play, including great fun with some plastercine; given by our friends Li Li and Ally , who popped in for a visit; and some more serious garden work on yet more vegetable plots.

Its been a good weekend for some ‘family discussion’ and getting the kids to understand why we ask them to work. It is important to us that the children here understand the ways of life, including needing to work for what you want out of life. This weekend they asked me why I asked them to clear weeds ready for the growing plots. They pointed out how much quicker I am able to work. So I explained that I would do them no favours by doing everything for them. The plots are to grow food for us all to eat and they need to learn that this all takes effort. The work also, hopefully, brings the rising self esteem from being able to say ‘we did this’.

Today we had a delivery of a truck load of soil which now waits to be distributed to the new plots. For now it is a bit of a playground, which brought forward another disucussion about learning to think ‘safety’. One of the kids called me to proudly declare that they had dug a great tunnel in the soil pile. Past horror stories about children playing in unsupervised building sites flashed through my mind.

So using a plastic bottle as a demonstration ‘child’, I got all the kids gathered round and showed them what could happen if a playful child decided to enter the tunnel, unaware of how fragile the soil was.

Some of them had been keen to run up the pile jumping and dancing at the top and running down the sides. Great fun, but none had thought to put away the wheelbarrow and shovels that sat close to the pile.

“Is it safe?” I asked.

“Yessss!!!” came the reply.

So being careful to keep good hold of him, I demonstrated the likely trajectory of Jack happening to trip and fall down the far side of the pile, and how his head would likely collide with the edge of the wheelbarrow.

After putting all the garden tools away properly, the children played carefully for a while longer, in safety.

With summer weather back for the day, it had to be Huay Tung Tao again.

Wispa only needed calling once and ran over to jump in the truck with the kids, clearly looking forward to the day out as much as they were.

We had a near full quota of children this week, general behaviour having been very good all round.

The children have pointed out a need for a fan in the back of the truck , as when the sun is up it gets very hot back there.

We will see what we can do.

We spent 3 and a half hours there this Sunday with the children building sand castles, playing in the water, and spending some time in the playground, on the swings etc.

Not forgetting eating kanom and drinking pop.

One minor, problem after about five minutes of being there , was  poor little May getting a bloody nose after some over exuberant play on entering the water.

A plus side to this happening was seeing the care between children as Tai applied make shift first aid with the ice we had brought for drinks.

I stepped up my exercise, with much more serious swimming whilst there, but also found time to chill as did Boon.

For more photos please visit our photobucket album here.