You make me happy when skies are grey...

I finally got some sun!

After two weeks of being here the sun finally stayed out for a full day! It was beautiful! Of course it just so happened so happened to be the one day I decide to wear longer pants and not sandals…but shoes. I mean, what are the odds? In spite of it my inappropriate attire, we all laid out in the grass during lunch time and turned just a little pink. My first New Zealand sunburn! :)

My maths (yes, it's supposed to be plural) class has been so fun. We started on Monday and to be honest I’m a little sad that tomorrow is our last day. Our teacher, Helen, told us to bring grungy clothes because we’re going to be using paint and dye!

Ok, so kind of funny. We were sitting at the corner bakery Monday morning waiting to head down to the church building and just talking about something over the weekend when this woman sitting at a table near us asks us if we’re BYU girls. I was really surprised as to how she could just pull something like that out of the blue and she starts by explaining that she could tell we were American because of our accents. I’m still trying to figure out how out of all the schools in the United States she could tell we were from BYU. I went over our conversation and thought if we’d mentioned anything about it, I checked my shorts length…maybe that was the give away. Haha, then she asked us our names and said “I’m Helen”. Unfortunately at the time that didn’t mean anything to me so I simply said it was nice to me her. It was only until we were walking away that Brooke explained to me that she was going to be our math teacher! That’s how she guessed so accurately.

She’s been so great! She makes me laugh all the time. We end up doing some of the strangest things in her class. I can’t imagine what anyone would think if they walked by and looked in through the window. In one of our activities Helen came around with a camera and took pictures of us. She was laughing so much…I’m suspecting that she made us crawl around on the floor and blow a rubberband purely for her own amusement.

Some of the other things we’ve done have been:

Tracing our feet six times, cutting them out and seeing if we are perfectly proportional. (If we were the feet should match up with our height.)

Playing a very strategic game of Connect Four. It's really a mix between Connect Four and Bingo that involves a lot of basic math and strategy. Mikaela and I decided to call it Stratingo...haha.

Playing “Name that Card” with face cards

Dinosaur Caves dot game

Apparently if you wrap a string twice around your big thumb it should fit exactly around your wrist. It worked! Mikaela and I tied ourselves together after that.

Measuring out a giant and drawing him/her on the sidewalk, using only his hand length to create proportions

Making “lolly” bundles of ten for Mr. Wonka

Figuring out how many presents you’d get from your true love if you’d really gotten all those things for the Twelve Days of Christmas (See if you can figure that one out...)

Learning to write upside-down

She’s also taught us where in the heck a “foot” came from. And why it’s called a ruler. And where we got the inch. I’m still a little unsure of where they got that name though. It’s a little ironic that I had to learn about that from someone who uses the metric system.

Here's a little picture of our table on a typical day of maths:

Phyllis, Brooke and I have been having a good time together as well. We had our whole FHE group over for dinner on Monday and it was a lot of fun. Phyllis seemed very excited! We prepared the dinner with her and set it up on a round table out on the patio. We had chicken, peas, pumpkin, potatoes, kumara (which is like a sweet potato) and gravy. It was all very good. Although…I’m not actually a huge fan of the kumara. Last night Phyllis mixed all the leftovers together into a very creative dish with apricots and what not. Hot fruit is not my favorite. I’m getting a lot better at eating things that I don’t particularly like. I haven’t yet found anything that I absolutely dislike. FHE turned out to be a good experience. Ramona’s husband gave the spiritual thought and then we all sat around and talked for a long time. We played a little bit of Uno too.

On Sunday we finally got to go to our own ward and it was so good to be able to be in church again. This is my first time going to church in another country and it has really made me realize that we are a part of something so big! The Gospel isn’t just in the United States…it’s worldwide. There are people on the other side of the world that think and feel just the way I do about the church. It’s so nice to see that it’s the same no matter where you go. We were given the opportunity to teach the 12-13 year old Sunday class. It was different that what any of us were used to because we’ve only done practicums with first graders and our minds are so geared towards younger kids. We taught a lesson on Agency and the Power to Choose. I wish that we had been more prepared because the message of that lesson is such a good one. We’re going to be teaching that same class for the next two weeks so hopefully we’ll be able to plan a lesson that they’ll remember. It might be the teacher in me, but after we left I was already planning ways to try and get them to participate a little more the next time. Relief Society was my favorite. A sister that doesn’t normally teach gave the lesson and she did a wonderful job. We learned from the manual about charity and service and about doing small acts of kindness for your neighbor. She gave us a lot of her own real life examples and then handed out pieces of paper to all of us. We were supposed to write our name on the piece of paper, fold it and hand it back. She then redistributed them and we were given a name that was not our own. We were asked to write something we admired about that person, whether we knew them very well or not. It turned out that I actually got the name of one of the mother of our friends’ host family. Afterwards she collected them again. The lesson really left an impact on me. My favorite quote was “You cannot drive people to do things which are right, but you can love them into doing them, if your example is of such a character that they can see you mean what you say.” It’s my new goal. I want to be like that.

I’ve already been here two weeks and it all has seemed so surreal! It’s weird being here after planning for so long. I know it sounds a little cliché but every day really is a new adventure for me. I’ve done so many things I’ve never even had the opportunity to do before and seen so many incredible sights. Seeing how beautiful this place is in the radiant sunshine of today gave me a new perspective. Things look different in the sun. I just can’t believe how lucky I am to be here. As always, I’m excited to see what tomorrow brings.

As a side note…I finished the first book in the Hunger Games series. Sooo good! (I can’t wait until the movie comes out! I’m going to include the trailer that I’ve now watched 323243789498 times.)

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