First thing I noticed attempting to swing to theAbysmal time, it's HARD now, because Monday was technically the middle of theAbysmal week and we kind of like having weekends with the person who works full time out of home, and also I've just noticed that something awkward has happened between my two copies of the converter. The form says it's C03r and the block in the blog sidebar says it's C04c. Meantime the official version says it's Month 2 Day 2 (I expected to be a day ahead and two days sometimes due to observing leap years on different years). So for now I'll have to keep track of tAT but continue using Gregorian.
Tao
I told the kids I was giving Tao's "Working with Numbers" book to Ru and started Tao on "Multiplication and Division" for 10-12yos. We skimmed through the introduction, I showed him how to use the time tables (and suggested they were probably a good thing to try to memorise) and the multiplication grid at the beginning of the book and then started reading through the first part with him. Mr "I can't read" looked a bit bored while I was reading upside down to him, after I explained what he was supposed to be doing I went to help Ru for a bit. He complained about having difficulty with a word, I told him the word was "factor" and suddenly he was flying through finding factors for numbers. He did most of them in his head (occasionally lagging with a big number) and stumbled with 49 enough to refer to the multiplication grid.
He found a game in the Play Store called Jurassic Park Builder, which is a town building game of greater complexity than same style My Little Pony game he and Ru have been playing. As well as having to actually read his way through the screens (the missions contain longer words, more of them and several dinosaur names, and if he tries to bungle his way through he has no idea what he's doing), there's been a bit of maths involved in resource management and finding out decorations serve as modifiers for coin producers, and that they stack. He has since rearranged his park to try to maximise coin production by stacking decorations together and arranging his higher coin producers around them to gain greater benefit from the modifiers.
I gave him the option of doing an English workbook or watching a documentary on Pompeii, he chose to watch the documentary and sat in front of the tv with Jurassic Park Builder on his tablet. To make sure he was actually paying attention, I quizzed him a couple of times on what was going on in the documentary and he was able to answer me accurately each time, thus proving his ability to multitask.
"What are they doing?"
"They're going to make some food that Marcus would have eaten."
"Who's Marcus?"
"The fossilised guy at the beginning."
Ruan
I was going to see if Ruan wanted to take over Tao's old workbook but she'd pulled out her "Addition and Subtraction" for 10-12yos. One of the first problems was colouring coding even and odd numbers in a 100 number grid. She did this for a little while and after colouring the numbers one by one up to 10, she suddenly announced "PATTERN!" and just coloured alternating columns. The following questions involved writing out sets of and adding up sets of even and odd numbers.
Given the choice of watching a doco on Pompeii or do an English workbook, she chose to play Reading Eggs on the laptop. When doing the online Reading Eggs the requirement is to open a new egg. Ru is once again a lot further along in Reading Eggs than I thought, sitting on lesson 75 as she is after completing the last set of exercises. She was a bit excited about only having a couple more exercises to go before she hits the quiz and is onto the next map.
Altogether now
We've managed to miss pretty much an entire growing season but a lot of the seeds we had could apparently be planted either all year or between spring and autumn, so we sat in the cubby house and planted out about 7 egg cartons of seeds. Once they get big enough the corn and the root vegetables will get transplanted into the vege patches in their little cardboard cups, and everything else will go into the aquaponics. If those cartons survive we'll replant with seeds that will go into the vege patches and try to scavenge more egg cartons.
We managed to miss both kung fu sessions this week (Wednesday because I was overtired and not safe to drive, Thursday because Cub fell asleep on me when we were supposed to be leaving and managed to stay asleep in an uncomfortable looking position on my lap while I was having a loud conversation with my sister over skype over the top of him), Cub's birthday party is on the weekend so need to prep for it, and there is a lion dance on Sunday.