It's STILL the school holidays

I always think that if teachers are serious about asking for pay rises and want support from the parents then they should do their pay negotiations as soon as the summer holidays finish - or even a week or so before the holidays finish. I'm sure that a large number of parents would then be more than willing to pay the teachers anything they ask for! In other words, it's been a long summer holiday and there is still one week to go!
Today I decided that I really should do something a little more with the children than just let them run wild all day every day which leads to boredom, which leads to fighting, which leads to screaming on my part, which leads to a generally unhappy family. So we ended up inviting ALL the girls in my daughter's class to come and play for the afternoon. Actually originally we were only going to invite two of the girls, but when there are only a total of 5 girls in the class and one of them is my daughter it gets a bit tricky to invite some and not others.... anyway, unfortunately (??) one was busy and another one got sick at the last minute so we only had two extra children for the afternoon and it was a lot of fun. The neighbour had kindly donated his long piece of bamboo for the children to do noodle catching with - well some noodle catching followed by some watermelon, tinned fruit and then jelly catching!
Next we made some cupcakes (they wanted to take them to the sick girl) and headed to the free river pool..... only to discover that there was no water in it! So we headed to the local B&G pool which is only 100 yen to get in and the kids had a great time swimming for an hour and a half. I thought it might be nice to watch them swim, but the pool was a semi-indoor one and the temperature inside was 46 degrees. So, I sat in front of a fan in a room close by and did crossword puzzles. Even the pool supervisors were in a completely separate air conditioned room where they assured me they were watching the children on monitors so I could just relax. It seems crazy to me that even that pool will close at the beginning of September... surely they could leave it open in the weekends at least for a bit longer! (for anyone who doesn't know ALL pools seem to close on August 31st in Japan - even though it is still over 30 degrees every day).
One last "recreation" program tomorrow then we are on a plane on Thursday to Hong Kong for 4 nights... I can't wait!