Friday of this week: not a typical day, but what is?

This week's Friday

8.20 I walked with the boys to school and realised my head hurt. I found a water cooler and scoffed some paracetamol down.

8.30-9.30 CAJ Community prayer meeting. I've only been to a handful of these so far and am already blessed. People might think I'm being super-spiritual going to prayer meetings, but really I am the one blessed by them. This really merits another post on another day.

I then returned home and worked on email, revised a document for my up and coming debut as an Occupational Therapy volunteer at CAJ, made a tentative start on sorting photos (realised that we haven't systematically printed any photos since late in 2008!) and wrote a blog post and read some other blogs.

Late in the morning my headache was gone, but my stomach began to hurt (this can be a stress symptom for me) so I lay down and read for a while until lunch.

I made Udon (Japanese noodles) and had a lonely, but quiet lunch.

From lunch time I made pikelets. At 2pm I was due to be an Australian Ambassador in my youngest's kindergarten classroom and I'd been asked to bring an Aussie snack. They turned out pretty flat. I discovered just how deformed my fry-pan has become - its bottom is not flat at all, all the pikelets tended to dribble into the centre! So no round, fluffy pikelets. But I rightly suspected that this wouldn't matter to a bunch of five and six year olds. Every single pikelet was woofed down along with Tim Tams that one of the teachers had found somewhere (they aren't readily available here).

As well as food, I talked mostly about Australian animals. We have a number of soft fluffy replicas that were popular. Also a lot of books with wonderful photos.

I got a couple of surprises, though:

• Gum trees. When you are in Australia you take these for granted. One of the Florida-born teachers admitted she didn't know what a Gum Tree looked like!
• Joeys. No one knew that a baby kangaroo was called a joey - not even my son!

By 2.30 I was finished at kindergarten. I went to the library and read until 3 when some talented student groups had a mini concert. A handbell group, flute ensemble and a large strings group. Wow. These kids are good, though you could tell it was only early in the year. I think they'll be even better later in the year. Can't wait.

At 3.30 everyone was out for the weekend. Our youngest has a piano lesson at school on Fridays, so we all hung around until 4.10. No hardship for the boys, they love to stay and play with many others, quite different to an Australian school. I sat quietly and read a good book. A few long-lived mosquitoes found me. I thought their season had passed.

Then we wandered home. Fridays my husband usually walks home with us. That is a treat. The rest of the week we often beat him by an hour or more.

At 5.30 we walked back to school. Crazy? Not totally. There were two inter-school volleyball matches scheduled. An interesting feature of inter-school matches is that the seniors raise money for their ministry trip to Thailand by providing a service. Something they call a "concession stand". Which basically means food and drink. Last night they had hot dogs, chilli dogs (still not sure what this is) and Japanese curry rice as well as lots of snack food. So, we ate out.

Then we had free live entertainment. Pity CAJ didn't win. At some point David took tired boys home and I stayed to the end of the "Varsity" game. Another new term! "Varsity" is basically the best team a school has, 'A' team, if you like. The game prior to that was called "Junior Varsity" which is the second best or 'B' team. It is not age-related, merely ability-based.

Just before 9 I wandered home alone (wouldn't do this in an Australian city) to find David filling in Japanese census forms. I showered and flopped into bed. Not an unreasonable day, but I felt like I'd done enough.