Sunday 27th

Katy’s first guitar concert.

Monday 28th

No guitar today, so we went up to town and had a BBQ lunch on the way to test out our new picnic set (we now have a picnic set which lives in the car so when we’re out we have the option of buying a marked down tray of snags and some bread from the stupidmarket and having a cheap lunch instead of having to buy fast food etc). We didn’t get everything but H quickly became intolerable from boredom, so we went home after getting about half of our list.

I’ve been working on an idea for amusing the kidlets using a box full of small random bits and pieces, and making up game cards for a treasure hunt. The kids both absolutely adore it and haven’t even waited for me to print them out, they’ve insisted on doing each of my completed gameboards from the computer screen. The other activity they can do with this (aside from just sifting through the basket and looking at everything, which is always hugely popular) is an alphabet mat so they can sort things by the first sound. I was deeply impressed that I managed to find a button with an Egyptian queen on it today but I think X is going to be more of a problem…

Tuesday 29th

We went up to town to Hobart co-op meet, which was small but sweet. We brought Wildcraft, which was a hit with the other kids. H and I played Junior Scrabble, and he joined in a bit with the Wildcraft game when one of the original players had to go home. K played another co-operative game with Audrey and Abby, as well as Wildcraft. We went home via the abbatoir and picked up 175kgs of pig, so there was a lot of faffing about getting that into the fridge and freezer when we got home. Pork chops for dinner (nom) then K and I headed up to Huonville again for choir.

Wednesday 30th

I went into Huonville to do the supermarket shopping, and to buy supplies for ham- and bacon-making. I also went to the various op shops, and came home with, among other things, a very decrepit copy of a co-operative boardgame called Kakapo Rescue. I spent most of the afternoon and evening brining and salting things but we found time for a game or two, and the kids were hooked.

Thursday 31st

We had a slightly castley day for our Castle Themed Thursday, with the kids getting into garb and finding their boffer swords and hobby horses and going on a quest, but it did not win over Club Penguin for long. Then our library books came home with Mr Bat, very late, and we all got engrossed in two of them which are of the spot-various-numbers-of-tiny-things variety. Except for one about Samurai castles, which is too info-dense for the kids, although we looked at the pictures and I read selected bits if they were interested.

K did a persona-writing exercise where she came up with a name and back story, which involved a lot of googling of different place names from the suggestion sheet to find out if any of them involved a royal castle where she could be a cook. We settled on York in the time of Bad King John, although she did not want to know why he was known as Bad King John. And I learned about a pogrom there in the C12th which I didn’t know about.

We ended up getting so completely fed up with the amount of time K has been spending on the computer lately that we removed their machine from their room. There was some woe, but it calmed down remarkably quickly and was further mollified by several more games of Kakapo Rescue.

Friday 1st

Local homeschooling group meet. Small turnout, but Adam brought pizza makings and I brought muffin makings, so H helped me make muffins, and all the kids got to roll out their own dough and put toppings on, and then we all had lunch. Apart from that, they played with the robot beads, and K and H showed Megan how to play Kakapo Rescue and Wildcraft.

Saturday 2nd

Lolly shop day and a play at the park with Mr Bat in the morning, then in the evening Mr Bat and K went to a pot luck feast in Hobart, and H and I stayed home and had some snuggles. MamaKaty went off to Meg’s with her scrogs for the night so it was just us. We watched a show about kakapo, to go with the general fat flightless parrot theme of the week, and then an episode of Life in the Undergrowth. Mr Bat and K got home very late, having had a nice time, and they performed The Song of the Men’s Side together which probably counts as K’s first bardic performance.

Sunday 3rd

I had a quiet day at home with the smalls. Mr Bat needed to do some paid work so he disappeared into his office and I sprog-wrangled. It did not go entirely smoothly, such as the time I set them up with iView on my computer and went and lay down to read a book and came back no more than fifteen minutes later to find that H had climbed into the very top cupboard in the kitchen and found a bag of corn packing peanuts and the glitter, which he then proceeded to drop all over the living room floor, but we will draw a veil over that. After watching two episodes of a show on Taronga Zoo, they wrote letters to their aunt. H wrote out the alphabet and his name for his letter, and we discovered that he can indeed form all the letters despite no-one ever sitting down with him and showing him. Then I got out the felt and embroidery thread in case they wanted to join me, and made a couple of little dolls, an Echinacea fairy and her two children. They ended up going out with Mr Bat instead of sewing with me, but now they are playing with their dolls and what I could find of the gnome home furnishings.
 
Monday 4th

Mr Bat took the kids down to the community centre this morning when he was doing a volunteer shift, and MamaKaty went up to town with her scrogs, so I had the house to myself for a couple of blissful hours. I spent it all sewing and chatting with Kris on FB. But I finished the Echinacea doll family, and the kids have been playing with them on and off all day. I got a book in the mail which I bought on eBay for K the other day – The Castle of Yew by Lucy Boston, one of my childhood favourites. Which reminded me that H is at about the age I started reading the Laura books to K, so we’ve started on Little House in the Big Woods as our first chapter book read-aloud. I love how much the kids could now identify with the pig butchering day in the first chapter!

Mr Bat went off to a small business workshop in the evening, so the kids watched shows or played games on Mr Bat’s computer until dinner, and after dinner H and I watched most of a show on iView, Origins of Us, about the evolution of the human skeleton, while K played a flash arcade poker game *sigh*