summer time fun...

katie and her babies

last week the local schools closed for summer so we have had a bit more time to spend with the children in the unit who are already crawling off the walls and proving to be a bit of a handful to our dedicated house moms, who are also nearing the end of the year and having to plan and prepare for their own family Christmas.

katie has been preparing some morning time activities for the older children but as we celebrated another public holiday on tuesday we decided to take all the children, house moms and volunteers to the local beach for an afternoon of fun. looking back it seems that we have done this each and every 'heritage day' and it's amazing to see the children's reactions as they get time to play in the sand and swim in the sea.

greg's castle

they are such a pleasure to be with and i think every child dipped their toes in the sea with some taking it a little bit further by actually trying to body board!.....greg made a huge and complex sand castle trying to replicate the french island setting of mont saint-michel but one of our more challenging (in a very sweet way) boys had other plans and duly knocked it down before greg managed to finish the moat.

moms it the beach!

beach soccer

on wednesday morning it was the turn of the sports outreach children to have some time at the beach, we work with over 450 children each week so it was a bit of a mission trying to plan for all of them to attend the day that they look forward to all year, however as around 250 of the children are under the age of nine there was no way that we were going to put ourselves under pressure to take them (there will be a 'next time' for those children as they grow up into our senior clubs), so that left around 200 who would have loved to have come.

happy kids

in the end we booked two 60 seater buses and with the help of our sports mentors, volunteers and willing others we end up taking over 75 children from four of our daily clubs, it's always hard to chose how to run these things but as many of our children return to the eastern cape for Christmas we are confident that most of the children who remained in grabouw were able to join us.

fun times for the girls

as you can imagine looking after 75 children on a wide open beach with an inviting sea to entice them is no mean feat but we are thankful to say that none of the children ended up as shark bait and apart from a badly cut foot (which occurred as one boy stepped on a piece of discarded glass whilst playing football) everyone returned to their homes in grabouw in one piece!

greg came up with a novel idea to split the children into ten separate groups with two leaders responsible for that team, we then placed netball bibs on the children, all an array of colours so our team leaders could keep a check on the children in their group. this worked so well and i'm sure it provided the beach with a riot of colour as the children ran in and out of the sea, having the time of their lives.

a riot of colour in gordon's bay

it's always great to see the children playing and being truly free for a few hours, leaving the cares of their complex lives behind and having fun together. this is one of the day we will miss when we leave the project in february but trust that our team will continue to offer both these wonderful opportunities to both the sports outreach children and those that we care for in our 24/7 unit.

special thanks to lisa baldry for the wonderful photos!