Sunday 1 February 2009

Bomb It and Sesame Street - Friday Jan 30 2009

Hello,
I'm sorry this post is coming so late, but I've been so busy with schoolwork all weekend that I haven't had a chance to sit down and take a break until now! (First-year is way intense.)
So anyways, on Friday (Malcolm's anti-shift), other volunteers there were Tony, Mike, and Lindsey! Tony I haven't seen for a whole month because two weeks ago he felt wimpy and called in sick (:P). Mike and Lindsey used to be bi-weekly friday night volunteers, but because they live in Pitt Meadows (so far away!), they are currently on-call volunteers. It was great to see them again!
So we checked in upstairs with the nurses and went downstairs to have a delicious dinner with family, kids, and nurses. I sat beside Kaitlyn, who has this awesome set After dinner, I spent some computer time with 5-year-old Lucas, who is one of the most animated and humorous little boys I have ever met. He wanted to play some shooting game on miniclip.com, but I decided to expand his online game repertoire and introduced him to "Bomb It" on agame.com. This game involves moving a character using arrow keys in a 2-D area and setting bombs to blow up blocks and other players using another key. At first, Lucas had a bit of trouble coordinating his hands with what he wanted to do, but he got the hang of it very quickly and started to really enjoy it!
Then it was 7pm and his mum wanted him downstairs for a snack before bedtime, so I pried him off the computer and we met his mum in the kitchen. Have you ever tried eating apples with peanut butter? I've never tried it before, but Lucas and mum were gobbling it up and apparently is very delicious. I must try sometime.
Tony took off early because he was dead beat from waking up at 4:00am, and I went to find Mike and little 2.5 year old Matthew in the art room. The little boy has a heart defect and it was important that we kept him unagitated. Regardless, he was very hyper and full of energy, and later in the Snoezelen room he was crawling all over the place. We played a game(very repetitive) where we would cover Matthew with a blanket and exclaim, "Oh my gosh! Where has Matthew gone?" and Matthew would reply excitedly whilst quickly uncovering himself, "He's here!"
Soon enough it was time for Matthew take a bath, and then Mike and I spent some time with Eliza, who was watching "All Dogs go to Heaven." Quite an awesome movie.
After Matthew was clean and in his Canucks PJ's, I sat with him on his bed and we watched Sesame Street. His attention quickly got diverted to an interesting fleece blanket on the bed though, which had clocks and flags printed all over it. He took the blanket and covered me with it, and smacked various printed clocks to make the fleece wrinkle up and said "I broke it!" Then he stretched the fabric back to smoothness and exclaimed "I fixed it!" So so so cute. I loved spending time with him.
Sooo that's it for this week! I believe Malcolm will be posting next week. =)

PS Malcolm - I noticed that you changed the colour scheme of the blog, and it looks awesome! Some words don't show up though, because they're the same colour as the background (such as the description inside the box, underneath "canuck place adventure challenge", as well as other things and headers like the dates, "posted by", or "# comments" that sort of stuff. Maybe change the colour of those words to lighter or darker?

The Blog

My name is Malcolm and I was a volunteer at Canuck Place Children's Hospice in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada for nearly seven years. Now I support them by raising money by participating in the Canuck Place Adventure Challenges!


I said hospice. Not really a word that you associate with children but there you go. We will tell you about the house as this blog progresses with the hope that you will learn, and as you learn we hope that you will share. The purpose of the Adventure Challenge is to raise money for AND awareness about Canuck Place.

The name of each kid at the house you read about has been changed.

September 14th and 15th are the dates for the next Adventure Challenges.

You can sponsor me for the race here: Adventure Challenge
Maybe you should do the race?

Names:

Just a quick note about the names of the kids in the house that you will read about: they are made up!