Our Adventures in Portugal: Adding Spice with Extra-Curriculars

Just like back home, our family does best with scheduled activities to get us out of the house, be social outside our family nucleus, and try something new. The allure of a relaxing, calm weekend morning, just hanging out at home, seems eternally beyond us...sigh!

Thus far, we've landed on the following activities:

Roller Skating - every Saturday morning, we walk to a super retro 1950's roller rink, complete with arena seating. For an hour and a bit, we all roll around to the musical prowess of U2 (same CD every time). The kids LOVE it!

Our confident Roller Girl--
with pink Dora skates to boot!

Roller Hockey - Jonty is on a roller hockey team, with practices 2 evenings a week, and games twice a month on Sunday mornings between 10 and noon. This schedule is so civilized after our ice hockey experience in Peterborough with 7am games and practices...

As you can imagine, stopping, turning, and sliding is super different on roller skates, but he's getting there. After watching his game last week, Gabi was keen to try. So they are now going to practices together. The club has been great--LENDING us all the equipment!

Note: helmets are not worn. This is really weird for us...

Go Sesimbra!

Rules are similar to ice hockey, minus icing and offside.
Oh, and you can't hit the ball with your skates.

Giving it a try!

Community Theatre - Gabi is our diva; she loves to dance, sing, and dress up. So, she and I have joined a family Community Theatre where, once a week, we do different activities like improv, acting, stage movement, etc. The goal is to create a play. Day 1, Gabi stood in front of the group and sang "A Whole New World" in English--no fear. She was made for this ;)

Portuguese Language Classes - Mark realized last week that he might not be able to understand Catarina much longer, as her Portuguese has exploded. Where she would have once said "Mommy, I want more leite please", she now says "Mae, I quero mais leite se faz favor". So our super-daddy started school this week.

Mark's First Day of Portuguese School.
They grow up so fast!

Badminton - Jonty trains badminton at the high school once a week. He has his first tournament in two weeks. It's a few towns over: family road trip! The school does organize transportation, but for his first tourney, we are going to take him.

Library & Movie/City Theatre - The library here has story hour every other weekend where kids enter a mini auditorium and listen to a story complete with puppets and sets. The alternating weeks have workshops: painting, arts&crafts, movement. The Theatre hosts "Family Sundays" with family friendly theatrical productions once a month, and cartoon movies twice a month. We go when we can. Yesterday we had tickets for the musical "Hakuna Matata". Poor Mark--he couldn't even understand the storyline, let alone the dialogue...the kids translated.

Story Hour - the Portuguese version of "Stone Soup"

Getting cosy for a theatrical production about "Fear".
Jonty got called up on stage!

Tennis - I found a spot to play and learn tennis, and hope to sign up in January. Yay!

Another family past-time has become going for a walk along the beach on weekend evenings, and stopping for pastries and coffee. Family favorite: Farturas (anyone read Percy Jackson?!)--deep fried batter rolled in cinnamon sugar and served hot. A piece of heaven!