Exchange to Oz: Here's What You've Missed!

This free picture collage personalized with Smilebox

The last couple of weeks have been filled with small adventures - mostly for the boys as I have been busy (but you all know that!).

So in an effort to bring you up to speed, I have created a smilebox of what you've missed.

Jake has been busy at the skate park with his "mad" scooter. You can see some clips of his scooter tricks that he has learned. He loves the scooter and is learning new things all the time. He spends nearly every waking moment with his feet on that "deck". We are going to have to dismantle it and split among our suitcases to get it back as we are NOT returning without it! Jack enjoys playing on the scooter too!

Jacob has also been busy with "Athletics", which we call Track and Field. He has learned to do discus, high jump, shot put, long jump and of course the running events. He's a natural and did quite well at the Carnival after having on had a couple of tries in each event to learn to do it. He came 2nd in high jump having jumped 1 metre 10 cm. He came 1st in his 200m heat race and third in the 100m race. He was on the relay for his house team. We are proud and he really enjoyed it!

Jake's class and my class are training in Rugby right now for a Catholic Schools tournament next term. We have just started the training but Jake said it was fun. We'll see how that goes...

Sam has also been very busy with his mid-semester exams and sports. He had 7 exams in one week but pulled through it okay. He studied hard every night and I think the experience was good for him. Footy has been keeping us busy as well. Sam's team is 2nd in the entire district. It is really exciting to watch and he is improving all the time. They played on Sunday in the roughest game I have seen yet. Play doesn't stop during a tackle and it seemed at one point, the ball just moved along from person to person to the ground, with kids scrambling all over one another to grab it, only to have it fumble away just out of reach. There was a lot of body contact - the most I've seen yet. At one point a fight even broke out (no - Sam wasn't involved - phew). One thing that really struck me on the weekend was that even when a player is down (injured), play does not stop. Someone comes onto the field, checks them out and takes them off the field - all during play!

Sam also had an Athletics carnival at his school. The highlight for him was javelin. He got to try it and was pretty good at it - 2nd place. The winning kid bounced his off of Sam's and it went further. Dan and I told him that we've never had that event at any of our track and field days so he can chalk that one up to another new experience.

We are very excited as this weekend is the long weekend here for Queen Victoria's Birthday. This is our first long weekend in Australia (no Family Day, May Long, July 1, Labour Day, Thanksgiving etc...) We are heading to Melbourne on Saturday to see our first AFL (Aussie Football League) professional game at the MCG! We are very excited! The game we will see is the Geelong Cats vs. the Hawthorne Hawks. The MCG seats 100,000 people and being a long weekend and that they are 2 popular teams, we have a lucky chance at a good crowd. We don't know

who to root for and frankly we don't care. We are just along for the experience!