Quote from Hugh: “The stick I made at Co-op is also a really useful tarsier finger…”
He went on to explain, “A tarsier is a kind of monkey with a really long finger”. I have no idea where he picked that up from, lol, but I’m pretty sure I didn’t know that at the age of five. Although technically a tarsier is a primate, but not a monkey.
Maths: doing the I love you two-three-four etc game with Hugh this morning, he can now count past 29, 39 etc without going to 20-10, 30-10 like he used to.
This morning’s excitement for the kids was watching the digger excavate the drainage hole for MamaKaty’s yurt, and a drainage trench for our laundry pipe. When the digger had gone, there was still the big pile of dirt to play on, so of course they all got filthy dirty and had to get changed. But it was too cold to be out there getting muddy and wet, so they’ve mostly been inside. Katy has been playing even more guitar and recorder, and her focus for the last couple of days on reading the music without the note names written in has paid off as she is now obviously sightreading! Very exciting 😀 She’s also discovered musical rebuses where you read the word from the notes on a clef, and Mr Bat found her a list of words she can make with the eight letters of the octave so she played around with that idea for a while. She has played through two recorder books so far this morning and moved onto a third. I can’t imagine where she gets this single-mindedness from *ahem*
Da Boy was questing about being a PITA and looking for something to do, so I pulled out the felt stuff and started making a robin ornament for the Winter table/Yule tree. As expected, he gravitated to the table, along with Dougie and Katy, so I set them all up with felt things to make. Dougie had to go off with MamaKaty (they went to Meg and Adam’s to smoke the experimental bacon) before he got to do anything with his, but Hugh finished decorating his matrushka doll, although he used glue rather than sewing. Katy started working on her robin, although she got distracted and went back to the recorder after a while. I have finished mine and hung it up on the table, and am contemplating how we can have a Yule tree which doesn’t get in the way of the laundry which has taken over the corner we usually put the Christmas tree in! I also want to make more ornaments, like toadstools, snowflakes, candlesticks, owls, little houses with snowy roofs, and a couple of pigs to remember Sunday and Honey by.
Yesterday was the Imot, and Jan, Libby and I had all brought stuff for the kids to do, as we’d discussed previously. They made felt pouches – Dougie and Katy sewed a rectangular pouch with a flap, and Hugh and Clare threaded a drawstring through pre-punched holes in a round pouch. Libby also brough stuff for making cloth boardgame boards for tic tac toe and nine men’s morris. The kids also spent a fair bit of time on the computers, but it was unusually harmonious…
Today was a quiet day at home for the most part, after Dylan took the scroggins off to town. Mr Bat and the kids went to the local markets for a Mysterious Purpose in the morning. I played a lot of recorder, which inspired Katy to be similarly musical. Because I’ve ordered a new recorder book which includes Anitra’s Dance from Peer Gynt, I played that for them this afternoon, which led to reading them the book of the legend we have, and listening to the Classics for Kids radio show on Peer Gynt. I really need to get into more composer studies, since the kids lap it up, especially Katy.
Katy has been reading a lot when she gets bored. She’s currently reading through a book on kitchen science recipes, called something like Freaky Food, and doing some of the experiments. She has a second go at the rubbery egg (eggshell dissolved in vinegar) experiment happening, after her first one was unsatisfactory. Hugh has one of his own going as well.
Friday afternoon we did indeed make some furniture for the dolls house. I made one wooden chair (cut out of a cylindrical section of branch) and Mr Bat made the other one, then he made a table and a bed as well. The bed is still too small for the big Echinacea dolls but they fit on it with their heads on the bedhead so that will have to do! I made an all-in-one felt mattress, with pillows and blanket attached so they won’t get lost. The dolls house is not quite at the right scale for the Echinacea dolls and their furniture but the kids don’t seem to care.
Mr Bat has been playing board or card games with the kids each evening after blitzing the bedroom and learning room to keep them tolerably tidy, which seems to be working out well. Katy is loving Bartok in particular, but even Hugh can play, although he would still rather watch “David Aperture” most evenings. Tonight I think they played Bingo, but they’ve had Kakapo Rescue out lately as well. I have several new boardgames arriving in the near future, courtesy of eBay, so family games night can continue without us all getting intolerably bored of the two games we currently own.
David CONWAY, Shine, Moon, Shine
Ruth HOROWITZ, Crab Moon, 2000
Bronwyn HOUSTON, Staircase to the Moon
Helen ORME, Blastoff: The Moon
The smalls managed to eat enough protein for breakfast that they played together very harmoniously all morning. It helped that it was sunny and relatively warm, so they spent most of it in the garden, playing on the bikes and in the climbing tree. I cooked fried rice for lunch and they wolfed it down, so I’m hopeful that the harmony may continue.
Katy’s coloured glasses and lenses finally arrived from the optometrist, although we had to pay for the replacement ones. Katy put them on while she was reading one of the library books and appeared to have no problems with it. I think that after the 3D movie, when she suddenly realised what we were all trying to get her to aim for, she’s actually been motivated to change. In fact a lot of the time when you look at her she does already seem to be using both eyes to focus, so I’m hopeful that her brain has caught the trick of it and just needs a bit more practice to make it automatic.
I helped Hugh finish off his second peg gnome from yesterday. He wanted it to be a bird, so I gave it an orange body, orange wings with purple spots (which look more like bat wings, but anyway) and a purple tail. He did the beak yesterday. It’s very cute, and is now living in the new dolls house.
Speaking of which, I have now finished my cup of tea and so I need to go out and help the kids find materials to make furniture for the dolls house…
We had a lovely Themed Thursday this week. I didn’t put a lot of effort into putting holds on books, figuring that there would always be books on fairies at the library even if they were nauseatingly pink, but then we couldn’t find any. So we didn’t read any books, but the kids dressed up, we did a few themed maths activities, I made the Butterfly Matching Game with Hugh out of the sheets of stickers I bought the other day, and we bought paper plates for the busy box with the intention of making petal masks. We didn’t end up making exactly what I envisaged but the kids still had fun. We also picked up the mail, which included a bag of little peg figures, so when we got home we made gnomes, which took up a large portion of the afternoon and kept the kids happily engrossed.
I made a toadstool gnome, Katy made a gumnut, and Hugh made a big mess (and, eventually, a doll).
Our new dolls house arrived in the afternoon, with door to door service from the seller’s husband who happened to be doing a handyman job in Geeveston and dropped it off to us. In return we asked him about a couple of jobs we have and it appears that he may actually be the reliable handymammal we have so far failed to find, so he may get a bit more than $35 out of his housecall. The kids were thrilled with it. We need more furniture, however; possibly that will be an activity for Friday.
In the evening, H wanted to read more of Little House in the Big Woods, but the book has vanished. Instead we all watched some more of Lost Worlds, Vanished Lives, although the DVD corrupted partway through, and he watched an episode of Walking with Cavemen instead. Meanwhile, Bat and Katy played at least one round of Bartok, to the accompaniment of gales of evil, triumphant cackling from the daughter, and a game of Mhing. Katy is really getting into card games at the moment!
We’ve been looking forward to today for ages. K in particular was extremely excited to think about being able to see a rare astronomical phenomenonenon. We got a first look when the sky cleared just after 9am, but then it clouded up again completely and as we drove north to Glen Huon for HNL meet it looked very unlikely that we would get to see anything. This is what it looked like for most of the morning.
Fortunately the sun came out again, at least intermittently, by about 1pm. It was good to get that sense of movement, having seen it first when Venus had just started crossing the disk of the sun and then again when it was moving towards the edge.
With four pairs of glasses to go around, pretty much everyone got to have a look.
DH went down to the community centre again this morning and took the kids, then came home with them and spent most of the rest of the day working in his office. After lunch, I read some library books to the kids, did lots of laundry and finished menu planning; they played with various things off the shelves in the learning room and with their doll family, did some drawing, and played a long involved imaginary game involving puffles and penguins (during which they decided they wanted next week’s Themed Thursday to be about penguins). I went out during a break in the mizzle and started putting in the fence for the third chook run, DH came out and helped, and the kids pottered about with us and climbed the climbing tree. In the evening, K got inspired by one of the library books we read, The Buried Moon, to dress up like the Moon in the story, and then she ended up changing her costume to represent the different phases of the moon, and H dressed up as Space and then as Sunny Sky (a yellow Snow White dress with a blue cloak over it). I love seeing their imagination firing. H watched David Attenborough while K and Mr Bat played Mhing, the mahjongg card game, before bath and bed.
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*