What a good week and a great weekend! I had a good week with the kids at school this week - I wish that things had started to gel much sooner than this, but I will take as much as I can get right now. We are still having to do too much assessment for my liking, but it's got to be done and so we've been working hard on making that happen. We had a Prep/Grade 1 meeting on Thursday where we had to present how our kids are doing on the goals we set about a month or so ago. Our Prep kids did very well on achieving the goals which was nice to report. I told the group that I had interviewed the parents of those children who were struggling with achieving those goals to help out at home and the acting principal seemed pleased with me doing that, so I was happy about that.
Our weekend was so good! We camped with our friends, Robyn and Geoff, for the weekend at a place called Yandina about two hours from HB so that we could go to Stake Conference. Dad picked me up from school on Friday and we drove to the campground. When we got there, Robyn and Geoff had already set up their tent for us and had supper organized, as well. We were all pretty tired that evening and so we headed off to bed early. They had put really nice thick foam mattresses in our tent and so Dad and I both slept like little babies. :-)
When I woke up on Saturday morning and the sun was shining in the tent, I figured that it was late - would you believe that it was only 5:19am - sheesh! I couldn't get back to sleep and so I got up - Geoff, Robyn and Dad got up shortly afterward and we were off to start our day by just after 7am. We started off at a local market - lots of plants for Robyn to look at (and buy some) and other stuff to check out, but not much interesting to Dad and me (other than a book to read in case I woke up early again which I bought for $4). After that, we drove to a city called Mooloolaba (a seaside town) - we walked the main street and then went to the beach where we had lunch, dipped our feet in the water, and sat down beside the water to talk and watch the boats go by. What a beautiful way to spend the morning. After we dropped off the guys at the Kawana Waters chapel for their priesthood meeting, Robyn and I returned to the campground to have a lovely swim in the pool there before getting ready for the evening session of Stake Conference. They served us a meal there which was really nice. There were a number of speakers at that session including one girl, Nicole, who had joined the church in HB and she talked about her journey to become a member of the church including the importance of fellowshipping new converts. Also, a marriage counsellor spoke about how to have successful relationships, not only with your spouse, but also with your parents, siblings and friends. There wasn't anything new in what he had to say, but it was good to be reminded of the importance of making time to develop and strengthen these relationships. After the conference, we returned to the campground and stayed up until 10:30pm chatting. What a wonderful day!
The next day we drove to the Nambour Civic Centre (the church rents this space out as there isn't any chapel big enough to hold all the people who would be attending Stake Conference). The speakers at Stake Conference were great - a young boy, a returned missionary, the Temple matron and her husband, the Temple pesident, the mission president and his wife, and our Stake president. It was wonderful to be spirituallly fed and to be among the saints of the Stake to which we belong. It did seem strange that we didn't know anybody other than those in our ward (and the Stake Primary president for me and the Stake representative for family history for Dad) - in Canada, there were always tons of people that we would talk with after conference - people who we had met over the years and enjoyed catching up with.
After a return to the campground for lunch, we decided to go for another drive and ended up in a little town called Montville. It reminded me of Niagara-on-the-Lake - very quaint and plenty of little stores to check out. We did a lot of stickybeaking in stores and saw a few things to buy (which we will do next time we are down in that area on a Saturday). The scenery on the way home was incredible - there was this one viewpoint we stopped at which was fabulous - I took tons of photos which Dad will download this week and I will post on the blog then.
We had such a wonderful time this weekend and are looking forward to doing it again when we come back from Canada. We get along so well with Robyn and Geoff and hope to be able to travel with them again, as well.
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