Gawd, I hadn’t realised it was so long since my last update…
Friday
I can’t remember a single thing we did, except that I know we went to the library and post office. It was a better day than Thursday, anyway.
Saturday
Went into Huonville to see the real estate agent and sign the contract. Then Mr Bat took the kids off to the park and have fish and chips for lunch while I did my own thing for a few hours.
Sunday
Pottered about. Mr Bat took the kids for a walk over the hill and down along the little path by the river which appears to be K’s favourite spot in the valley. I had to come and collect them because K hurt her foot and nobody really fancied walking all the way back up the hill again.
Monday
No HIP today. K complained that homeschooling is terribly boring because I never give her any work to do, and she wants to go to school (I suspect too much Laura Ingalls Wilder here!). So I suggested that we could sit down and do some bookwork if that’s what she wanted. She pulled the pile of workbooks and activity books out of the cupboard and spent an hour or so happily doing that. H and I did a sticker workbook together too. K lost interest after a while and went out to play, but we left the books out and she came past a couple of times and spent shorter periods working on them. I noted that she has totally gotten the hang of dot-to-dots now and can make a recognisable picture with the straight lines from number to number (last time she went through a dot-to-dot stage the lines wavered all over the place while she looked for the next number). She has absolutely no problem with identifying onset phonemes from a picture/word puzzle. And her pattern-matching is improving (eg. she’s getting the hang of those puzzles where you have to match the shadow to the shape).
Apart from that, we went to check the mail and buy some butter, then came home and made playdough. They also spent heaps of time in the garden playing together and getting stuck in trees. And in the evening, when I got into making dinner plus biscuits plus quiche for the park meet and was thus too distracted to interact much, they played happily on the computer together til Mr Bat came home. K and I are still reading Little Town on the Prairie, and Mr Bat has been telling stories and reading library books in the evening.
Tuesday
I made hummus for snacks, and ballasted the kids with porridge, then we headed off to the park meet at Long Beach. We got there around 11, and the kids raced off and played tirelessly for hours. Mostly in the playground with the other kids, but we did spend at least an hour by ourselves on the little beach with the kids getting sandy and wet and collecting shells and beach glass and chasing seagulls. There were remarkably few dramas between the kids, although there was one rather unpleasant little kid from outside our group who was harassing K briefly. One of the dads was there and got into playing hilarity-filled games of chasies with the kids, and a couple of random kids who wanted to join in. So by the time we left, around 4:30, the kids were totally knackered. By some miracle I managed to keep them awake all the way home, so I fed them a quick dinner, stuck both of them in the bath to get off the ingrained sand and grime, and then books and bed.