Monday, August 09, 2010

The joys of being a mother in Japan

Every year the parents at our school are given a 30 minute lesson in CPR and rostered on for pool duty once during the summer holidays. I don't mind it really - a chance to sit in the boiling sun continually counting bobbing heads to make sure that no one has been sucked under. A chance to gossip with the other mother also rostered on that day (and this year I could sit and chat with Megan too!) and of course the chance to scoop out the floaties in the pool before the children get in. This year this job was especially fun as there were zillions of baby frogs in the pool! Every where you looked there seemed to be another couple just hanging about learning how to swim. I did my best to scoop them out with the net, but those I missed were keenly scooped up by the children as they were swimming. Gotta love country kids!

3 comments:

  1. This post is so excellent, it really made me smile!!! : ) I hear ya, I love country kids too. ; )

    So many frogs in your net, good thing you scooped them out before any (gulp) died. At least I hope none died.

    Speaking of frogs Jo. And you'll probably "get this" when we went to Tokyo to get Noah's passport renewed way back in July or late June. We saw a frog trying really hard to stay onto the front part of our windshield. We had no idea he was there beforehand. But realized he was there as we were zipping along the highway at highway type speeds. He looked scared for dear life. Luckily/oddly enough he managed to stay on and when we stopped to park in Tokyo, we let him off on a bush in the heart of Tokyo. 1 little country frog taken to the big city. @_@

    Since then, we do try to walk around the car before driving off, but we're only human and sometimes in a rush we forget. When we were driving my dad to Narita airport, there were 2 frogs on the windshield. One blew off, and the other one, we sort of think it was a suicide. Honestly,perhaps he just got too tired of hanging on after a while but,it really did look as if he jumped to us. @_@ Poor little guy! He didn't stand a chance. We kept saying hang on little fella and then all of a sudden, he just hopped right off, when we were whizzing around the airport looking for the departure area. He couldn't have possibly survived. : (

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  2. I love pool duty too, our pool is only open fro 5 days and at that just 90mins so it's not that bad. I always wondered if anyone knows CPR.

    I don't know about frogs in our pool but during winter they drain the elementary school pool to a certain depth to breed dragonflies. We have a number of endangered species around here and our school has a project to replenish them

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  3. Gina, that's a great story!

    I haven't done pool duty yet. DH does that job, yay! Although seeing as I can swim and I am the one who did the CPR course, perhaps it should be me... but he is the PTA VP so he takes these sorts of things on for me.

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