Becca Finds Nemo: Sculpting Young Minds

Hola amigos!

So not surprisingly, this week has been pretty similar to last week, with my internship Tuesday-Friday and beach related activities on the weekend. Life is just oh so hard. Now for a new segment that I like to call:

Garden Talk

He loved this mask with all his heart

This week marked the second week of our internship at Lucas Gardens! As we become more familiar with the school, the students, the teachers, and the daily routine, I have come to enjoy the school even more. The kids are just so stinkin' cute! As Halloween is quickly approaching, Kaitlyn and I embraced our position as able-bodied-wheelchair-pushers and partook in two separate class excursions to the nearby shopping center. Our goal was to find Halloween costumes for the kids as well as decorations for their classrooms. As you could probably imagine, pushing wheelchairs through crammed and crowded Halloween stores is not a simple task, but after our second trip we were pros. We even get to go AGAIN on Tuesday. I literally know these stores front and back by now, but I'm not complaining. Thankfully, both trips went quite smoothly and I even managed to find some things for my Halloween costume :)

Kaitlyn snapchatting our first intern-esque coffee run

For the rest of the week, we helped the classes decorate their classrooms in addition to their regular curriculum. I'm just going to say right now that Halloween at Lucas Gardens is horrifying. Apparently Halloween has just recently become more popular in Australia within the past couple years, but Lucas Gardens truly embraces the holiday. The decorations throughout the school are probably some of the scariest that I've ever encountered. One classroom has noise-activated mummies/bats/other scary things hanging from the ceiling that cause the entire ceiling to shake when someone walks into the room. It scares me every time. Side note: In Australia, Halloween is a scary holiday (clearly), and they think that it's weird that Americans use Halloween as an opportunity to dress up as anything they want, as opposed to something terrifying. This has resulting in an ongoing argument between us and the teaching staff as to who does Halloween better. Obviously Americans do, no question.

Each class is also partaking in a pumpkin decorating competition so we have gotten to help decorate some of the pumpkins. Again, Lucas Gardens is taking this competition super seriously, including trash talk amongst the teachers. But their trash talk is not futile. All of the pumpkins look amazing, although my personal favorite is the one that I put the most work into which looks something like this:

Crayons are just amazing

Also guess what guys! Sidra got to come to Lucas Gardens on Friday!! One of the therapists at her internship makes trips to our school so that some of the kids can get their physiotherapy at school. We got to do a therapy session together and then Sid came and shadowed me in one of the classrooms for about a half hour. We cut out pumpkins and ghosts and then helped the kids glue decorations onto them. Sidra loved/hated every minute of it. But it looks like she'll be able to come to LG every Friday! I can't wait!

Next Wednesday is our Halloween celebration so I need to get my costume together! I don't want to disappoint the Halloween crazed teachers.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Friday night was this:

Somehow Sid has managed to be more Asian than both Ruthie and I

On Saturday, we took a trip to the Glebe Markets which were basically just a giant garage sale with live music and food. The atmosphere of the markets was really cool, unlike the weather that was blazing hot. This paired with my general disinterest in shopping produced no new purchases for this girl. Not that I could have fit into any of the stuff that these people were selling because EVERYONE HERE IS SO SKINNY. Sorry for yelling. When we got home from the markets, we all crashed and napped until dinner time.

Sunday was a beach day, obviously. A bunch of people from the program got together to go to the Sculpture by the Sea exhibit, a two kilometer long temporary sculpture park featuring sculptures by artists from Australia and across the world. The walk goes from Bondi to Tamarama beach and it was so cool. The artists that are selected to make sculptures for the event are each given a piece of land in advance either on the beach or along the cliffside to place their work. This makes for a gallery that is truly ingrained in the land and uses each original aspect of the beach to accentuate the art. So fascinating.