Cacti

I have a new obsession.  It started like this: last Thursday morning I had to do a bit of a tidy up as I was interviewing for a new maid (I know that to everyone else in the world that statement is so bizarre.  All I can say is, don't judge until you've lived in Singapore).  Anyway, we've been without a maid ("helper") for about 6 weeks.  I had to give the last one the sack as she was just not keeping up with washing/cleaning etc (but seemed to have a lot of free time).  As much as I liked her, and as much as I hate having someone else living in our house, I just had to get someone who could do all that I needed. Remember it rains here all the time.  Washing, shopping cooking, cleaning all needs to get done.  We get home so late that cooking is hard, especially when I have to stop at the supermarket on the way home to get what we need and walk home with it.  Anyway, enough about maids.  What it really comes down to is that I was cleaning up and noticed that my bamboo thing that someone gave me a year ago was dead.  So I pulled it out, tipped out the dirt, washed the pot and thought "I wonder if I could make a cactus to replace it?"

BAM! new obsession started!  I love the challenge of working out how to do it.  No patterns, just looking at cacti and having a go.

I can knock these out pretty quickly and they are VERY satisfying to do, and I actually love the look of them around the house.  Plants I cannot KILL!

I even went to my local $2 shop and bought a bunch of little pots for making more cacti.

 And this one, I took into school for my friend and colleague and inspiration, Ms. Lindsey Bailey, as a gift.  That's her in the far background and Ella working on something for her.

And yes, there's another one in the works.

I have spent every spare moment of the last few days doing these.  And yesterday I had my first sick day from work as after all the shenanigans of the weekend Kite painting work shop I was feeling really unwell on Monday.  A trip to the doctor, some antibiotics and I am finally feeling on the mend.

So "facilitating" the Kite painting workshop required two meetings last week, setting up on Saturday night so that the multi purpose hall looked like this:

Organising the supplies that we needed, working out numbers, mixing paints and colours and briefing all the volunteers on Sunday.

I was named Lord of the Paint.

Ella came and helped out on the Sunday.

 It was a great experience to do, and I'd be happy to do something like it again, although for the next five (!!!!)  weeks I'll be frantic as we finish up the school year.

And I had to share what I'm doing with my KG1 classes.  They are making a seasons book with 4 pages and their hand print as a tree that they can decorate for each of the seasons.  I also made up a little  page with 4 people doing various actions (that could be interpreted as, for example, picking apples, jumping in a swimming pool, walking the dog, skiing etc) that they have to dress using collage for each of the seasons, and we'll cut them out and put them in the book.

 When I got this lot back, I was in hysterics as I realised that it looked like I'd created 4 disco people (the one at the top is dancing so hard his pants are falling down.  And today, one of the kids totally called me out on that.  "you made us disco people!", he said and proceeded to get up and show me the disco moves.  Ah, I love those kids!