Weeks Seven, Eight and Nine!

Hi! It's been a bit since I posted last.  I just finished a ten-day work week because I swapped my days off with a friend.  Probably the hardest part about that as a work week was the weather, because it's been crazy hot and humid the past few days here.  Not so much yesterday, but Monday and Tuesday were really bad. But I made it. And now I have a weird upcoming week, with two days off, one on, one off, two on, one off, two on, one off, etc. I don't go back to my normal weekends for a while either because of other swaps I've agreed to with friends.

I'm going to give the highlights of these last fifteen days at work:

• When I asked a small child why it was a good idea to bring spiders outside instead of killing them (looking for something along the lines of "So they won't bother us inside/so they can eat the bugs we don't like to have around outside"), he said to me "Because they won't have anything to eat inside" and it was adorable.
• Additional languages I've now heard spoken: Swiss German, Turkish (family from Azerbaijan), Hebrew, Czech.
• Met a small girl whose shirt said "So many jelly beans, so little time." She gave me a hug while I was squatting down after I gave her the badge, and it nearly knocked me over...
• Saw the baby gorillas (we have two 2-year-old boys) being stinking cute.  They were playing with a bucket, and kind of falling over with the bucket over their heads. And wrestling with each other.  And one of them beat his fists on his chest, which just looked like a little girl trying on her mom's heels. And running along the glass wall of the viewing area, banging his hands against it. And more recently, I watched them chase a rabbit that was in their habitat. Which actually looked like a meme. 
• Learned about this collaboration from a guest and I'm very excited. I love Cath Kidston and Disney and it's going to be perfect. 
• Katie, to two small children: "Where are your grownups?" (always trying to make sure that little ones don't get separated from their families) Small boy (SB): "I'm a grownup!" K: "How old are you?" SB: "I'm four!" Child's father, who had come up: "He's three..."
• Connected with a family from NJ about the lack of decent bagels and pizza down here.  The mother told me how she sends her son bagels in care packages because he can't get decent ones where he goes to school, and I completely understand that.  All of my friends down here from NY/NJ understand what I mean when I say bagels down here aren't actually bagels.  
• Asked a small child what her favorite food is, and she told me "Nail polish."
• I was asked for the first time in my life if I spoke English after a girl heard me explaining the program to another guest in Spanish
• When I gave a young British boy his Senior Wilderness Explorer badge, we did a fist bump.  And without saying anything about it, we both did the Baymax fist bump and it was amazing. 
• At Headquarters, which is right by the entrance to the park, I heard a child say "But I don't want to go to Africa because it's hotter there!" (Africa is one of the 'lands' in the park, so just a different section of the park)
• Listened to a small child sing "I'm a tiny person! I'm a tiny person!" in his stroller as I was leaving HQ

Last Friday, we had a a Leadership Seminar during which we talked about what it means to be a good leader and went through different scenarios to discuss how we'd handle them.  The leaders for our program have been amazing and so incredibly supportive and motivating, so I know I was learning from the best.  It was also cool to discuss leadership as a topic and relate it to Disney :)

That's it for now, with a post about my fun days coming soon!