Getting crafty with it.

 Let me tell you something... Florida is hot. Like twice as hot as you think. The kids avoided going outside during the day for the entire summer, and I don't blame them, it was 40c out. This particular day I was sick of the video games so I subjected us all to the cruel torture of the outdoors. I mixed one part corn flour to one part water and a packet of Kool-aid to make chalk paint and we went to town on the driveway. We sweated our little booty's off but it was definitely worth it. And in true Florida fashion it was gone within an hour thanks to the 2pm downpour.

[Lulu, Valeria, Sebastian]

[Valeria's work of art]

[Sebastians work of art]

[Lulu and Valeria's combined effort]

[Valeria and Sebastian's combined effort]

Mall dates

Occasionally, (read: most days,) this little miss wakes up before me, and sometimes, this sort of madness occurs, usually after I've given up on the prospect of going back to sleep.

I had been promising Lulu we'd go to the mall one day for awhile so one hot, rainy typical Florida day we took the bus to the mall to get some school supplies and Starbucks.

[Having her feet tickled by the massage chair]

[crashed.]

Getting down with nature

Stephanie and the kids spent a week in Canada so on the Sunday I went up to Boca Raton with Tiffany and her kids for the day. We went to Gumbo Limbo, a nature reserve that specializes in the rehabilitation of turtles.

Then we headed up the road to Sandoway House Nature Centre to watch the sharks being fed. It was literally a old house with a pool in the backyard that someone had put a few sharks into. It was a weird but interesting experience haha.

After watching the sharks be fed we went and had lunch at a British Pub where I proceeded to spill our drinks not once but twice. Love love love Tiffany and these kiddies so much.

More July.

Lulu decided late one Sunday afternoon that it was imperative that we made a Barbie cake that night, so we rung Stephanie who was out getting our weekly groceries and put in a last minute request for some cake mix and frosting to put her plan into action. All was going well until Lulu got a bit too enthusiastic with her icing and sent the cake and our dinner plate off the bench and onto the floor.

So we tried again the next morning with slightly more controlled enthusiasm and some help from our neighbours Willow and Laci which thankfully, was a great success.

[Lulu - 7, Laci - 5, Willow - 10]

Every month I have a meeting I have to attend with the other Au Pairs in my area. For our monthly meeting we took an airboat tour across the Everglades to see alligators and explored the Sawgrass Recreation Park.

 

July.

I'm just gonna start by talking about how happy I was when snapchat brought back the 'double tap to reply' feature. Definitely saves me a solid ten seconds a day.

July was a busy month. I spent a day up at Singer Island with Nikki, an Australian friend I met at the training school. She's living with a family in New York who own a beachfront penthouse apartment on the island. We spent the day catching up, laying on the beach and eating haha. We had lunch on the beach at a resteraunt called the Two Drunken Goats Cantina, which was full of amazing stories and nick nacks.

Later in the week my host mum, Stephanie, took Sebastian, Lulu, Valeria (their older half sister from Columbia who was visiting for the summer), Anna (their older step sister) and I to see Katy Perry. What. A. Babe. My girl crush is borderline unhealthy. She puts on an amazing show, even Sebastian was singing along and dancing.

[Lulu, Valeria, Anna]

And thanks to the wonders of FaceTime I got to experience the concert with some of my best babes ;)

Ramblings.

So, lets be real here, I suck at blogging and I'm not even going to try and justify my absence or apologize for it.

Life's been happening, lots of little things that have't felt blog worthy have occurred  but I guess the point of this blog was to document my travels so I will probably do some back blogging! And it's a great way to procrastinate from my uni work ;)

So, we've moved house. We're still in a three bedroom apartment in a complex with shared facilities etc... We're about 20 minutes south of where we used to be and we're literally right across the road from the biggest mall in South Florida, which usually would cause issues for my wallet, however, its constantly 40c out so I just never leave the apartment. We were given the wrong apartment when we moved in so we will be moving apartments again hopefully in the next couple of weeks, so we are currently living with mattresses on the floor, one small tv and our dining room table, everything else is in storage. It's been great fun, we've played a lot of card games and found endless ways to use mattresses. However, I am looking forward to having drawers and not having to dig through my suitcase every morning to find clothes.

The kids go back to school on Monday, they're starting at a new school for this school year, still walking distance from where we live. Their older half-sister, Valeria, has been visiting from Columbia for the summer and goes home tomorrow which will be a bit sad. Four more days and I will be able to say I survived summer holidays haha.

A bag of Oreos only has 130 calories in case you were wondering, which you weren't but hey, - trivia!

My host mum, Stephanie, and I almost only communicate in sarcasm. This shirt was appropriate lol.