I had bought The Art of War in very recent history (can't remember precisely when but I feel like it's been at least a year by now) as 14yo had expressed a desire to read it. He didn't get around to actually reading it until recently, when he suddenly went on a health kick (both physical and mental) and on advice of J and 18yo, started trying to get in at least a little bit of exercise, eat a healthy breakfast (the kids and I don't really eat breakfast as we never feel particualrly hungry for a while after waking up) and read a book every day.

May

14yo and one of his friends developed an interest in the series Breaking Bad and marathoned it, and then made some "crystal meth" (coloured toffee).

I had asked J to book the Aboriginal Astronomy thing at the Gravity Discovery Centre for this month's excursion but as he had a lot of work on he kept forgetting/not getting around to it and finally booked it for next month.

13yo continued on his dessert presentation experiments, jumping on the Halloween bandwagon with this "vampire" themed one (the bananas were meant to be fangs), and the goblet was a prop we'd bought some other Halloween).

Towards the end of the week where we're running out of stuff and need to do more grocery shopping, there was this much simpler but still very delicious fare (can't go wrong with peanut butter as long as you're not allergic to peanuts).

13yo's kitchen experiments continued, he made sticky date puddings with caramel sauce.

Was delicious warm with ice cream.  He made two of them because he loves making massive batches of anything for some reason.  Worked out alright as I think most if not everyone in the house likes sticky date pudding.

We really didn't do a lot in April because it kind of sucked.  Both of our dogs died within weeks of each other.  Everyone was pretty devastated, the kids had grown up with those dogs.

The big dog was an early birthday/Christmas present for me as I'd decided I wanted a dog.  The kids were 5, 3 and 1 at the time.

The small dog came to us three years later.  J's dog had since died and we were considering getting another puppy when a friend asked if we wanted another dog as her parents were downsizing and unable to keep all of their animals.  We said sure and after a trial run, the small dog moved in.

It was another stay home month as I got too caught up in project related things and kept not sleeping, and also continually failed at finding places that we could go while unvaccinated. We did stuff though.

Like going into the TAFE and finding out that 15yo could try to get into the Cert I course that 17yo is doing next semester in preparation for going into the early childhood course sometime next year.

_{and now continues the eternal struggle to make sure she's up to speed with at least maths which she has always struggled with, English will be fine from what I've seen of 17yo's work}

As a slightly more fun English and Maths project (with a healthy sprinkling of Theatre and Drama), I asked 13yo to design a DnD game we could play. He happily agreed but is still trying to come up with something.

After ending January on a high, I was looking forward to finding more expensive excursions that the kids would be interested in and working out what cheaper or free things I could sprinkle in between.

And then vaccine mandates dropped which basically meant we weren't "allowed" to do much of anything.  Fortunately the kids were still "allowed" to go to gymnastics and TAFE, and in that time 17yo managed to regain his backflip (he had it last year, then lost it in the second half of the year), and on the same night got the double.

This one was recorded after he'd done quite a few of them and I was too slow to catch the roundoff at the beginning, he doesn't usually stack at the end XD

The month opened with 13yo being inspired by Genshin Impact (a game that 15yo and I have been playing together that 13yo occasionally joins us in) and making a chicken and mushroom kebab, which is one of the food items that can be crafted or purchased in game.

There isn't an actual recipe to follow so he just skewered and lightly seasoned and pan fried them.  Was very delicious.

September was States month and it felt unusually close to Regionals because it was (we had the slightly awkward situation of that we needed to put people forward for states before we had the results from regionals to make sure they'd actually qualified, and to add chaos to the confusion, because it had been another unprecedented year, people were allowed to apply for states if they hadn't done regionals (there were a number of people that missed out due to being sick or having to quarantine).

I forgot to mention, over badge test and regionals, 16yo learned how to make chips in a commercial deep fryer from one of the people he would accept chips from and helped out on regionals and states weekends.  He makes a great bucket of chips.  Below is one he handed me during a break.  We hung out at the door I guard before he headed back to the canteen to get ready for the between-round rush.