Last week and a bit have been slack and uncoordinated partially due to Easter and mostly due to the sleeping pattern going seriously out of whack resulting in myself and the kids going to bed way too late (me because I was staying up late to finish stuff off and also to make sure the bigs were asleep before turning out their light, and them because I have no idea).
Yesterday Josh and our neighbour Paul left me with seven kids (our three and four of Paul's five) while they did a market run before returning, leaving our groceries and packing off the kids to Paul's place to watch the footy (or at least Josh and Paul were watching the footy, the kids probably just continued playing). As I was packing the groceries away, I realised we still had some stuff left over from last week and a lot of it was getting to the stage of would need to be stewed to be edible. I made a mental note to clean out the fridge "at some stage" (which usually means til Josh gets to it).
Mondays have been stay-home days since I made the usual homeschool newbie mistake of overscheduling and spent a few too many weeks feeling run down and burnt out. Our usual thing now is to space out activities during the week, do stuff with Josh on the weekend and then spend Monday recovering from the weekend. Then of course there is the fun balancing act of making sure there is enough going on (there has been a bit too much screen in the past couple of weeks as we've been a bit slack). Before they became complete slack days, they were also days where I would attempt to make stuff (usually biscuits) for the week.
This morning all of us woke up at a reasonable time (though with the bigs their primary motive was wanting to play Spore). While Cub was having an early morning tantrum because I wouldn't put on a video game for him (he is actually quite capable of doing it himself, he'd just decided I had to do it for him and that was final, and I'd opted not to), the bigs and I went outside and collected leaves. Inside they did some leaf rubbings, and then I remembered all the aging veges in the fridge and chopped them all up to make chaos vegetable stock (it's very easy, grab all salvagable vegetables out of the fridge that might be too old to eat unless stewed and throw them into a pot full of water, add salt for preservative and more for flavour if you like salt, simmer for hours) and tomato sauce (chop up tomatoes, float them in a little bit of water, add a bit of salt or citric as a preservative and a bit more to taste if you like like and some oil if you want, simmer until it turns into sauce, will need stirring slightly more frequently than the stock). Add as soon as possible after the water has stopped boiling/bubbling to glass jars that have been soaked in boiling water or at least washed with very hot water (gloves are advisable, I burnt myself a few times because I am guaranteed to drop things if I wear gloves, and the water was kind of hot). We've been recycling "single use" jars that pasta/curry/etc sauces come in and they seem to seal fine while cooling.
To get rid of the leaves from the leaf rubbing, I decided they could make herbivorous dinosaur stomachs out of rocks and a bit of water in a container and see how herbivorous dinosaurs digested their food. After turning the leaves into mush (Tao had some pretty hardy leaves that refused to mush too much), we talked about how the dinosaurs (and current herbivores) get nutrients from the plants and poo the rest out (which of course kept the 8yo entertained for a while). The boys then scampered off to play and Ru used her tub to make "perfume".
Ru did one stack of maths on Khan Academy, Tao naffed around and avoided doing any to the point where I told him he would have to do it the following day. The following day, I set them up with some stuff to try science with, which was a win and needs to be repeated some time down the track. I reminded Tao that he had both maths and "Reading Eggs" (I meant English but they choose Reading Eggs so much over their other books that English bookwork has just become "Reading Eggs") if he wanted his pocket money for both. He acknowledged and promptly went outside.
Ru got another egg in Reading Eggs (she's up to lesson 82). Tao still hasn't done any bookwork so looks like someone isn't getting pocket money this week.
Earlier today we buggered off with the mother in law to the WA Museum. I only got a photo of the kids in the butterfly gallery as I spent most of the rest of the visit after that manhandling an overstimulated and overtired 4yo. We went right against the circuit rather than left and visited the hands on bit last instead of first (otherwise we'd never get out of there). The bigs got a lot out of the visit and probably would have gotten more if Cub had been less annoying.
I took a couple of reference shots of the roof of the museum and we discussed some of the history of times gone by and which bits of the museum seemed to be older. The Art Gallery cafe is still an awesome place to eat, we didn't get to do the art gallery this time much to Ru's disappointment as mother in law had to return to our place to get her car and then head home to go to the footy.
A friend got me onto Dragonbox which I finally got around to downloading onto the tablets. The recommendation is for 8+ (which the big boy is), but Cub seems to have picked it up with little drama after I initially showed him what he was supposed to do with the vortices. Tao and Ru are sailing through it with minimal dramas and both are able to read so they've been able to work their own way through it with minimal input for me (Tao asked for help spelling the name he wanted for his avatar). There have been plenty of over the top MUHUHAHAHA! from Cub as his dragons get bigger. So far seems like a win.