February Homeschool Miscellany

• home education

February was confusing.

I thought I had everything worked out. I was going to show 12yo how to get to and from high school for a couple of weeks, then cut her a key and leave her to it and just continue as normal with the boys.

I didn’t realise a) that this would be tiring and b) that 12yo kept insisting on being accompanied past the two weeks and both her and JJ were having epic freakouts about “what if she gets on the wrong bus” on the way home, as the bus route couldn’t be easy and just reverse, the opposite route goes in a different direction. I had told 12yo how to get back to the main road and where would be safe to cross and which bus numbers to take, but anyway.

I modified things so I was dropping her off in the morning at a park 10min walk from the school, she would walk to school while I walked my dog around the park (and played Ingressmon, which is why I take my dog as he knows to just sit and wait til I’m done, small dog just yaps incessantly), and then I would head home and the boys would hopefully be up and ready to get on with whatever we were doing for the day.

But then seeing as I also had to pick her up, our days were cut short. I committed for a term but told her if she wanted to continue past the term she would have to make her own way back (bit unfair to sacrifice someone’s education for someone else and all).

At the beginning of the month I decided to check out the koala park that I knew was in the area but as with Araluen had never gotten around to going. Typically the day I picked decided to be 4000000000C so 14yo felt a bit overheated and grumpy after a while (10yo was too distracted by the new place and animals to complain fortunately).

There were also other animals (both native and exotic):

The peacocks were just strutting about like they owned the place and the wallabies and some deer were in a place you could walk into. There were bags of popcorn for sale to feed the animals with but we didn’t pick up any. Poor things were probably too hot to eat anyway as most of them were about a sluggish as we started feeling partway through.

The boys were still amused by the cacophony that erupted from the parrots when some visitors who were feeding some moved on to the next cage and the ones being fed didn’t take kindly to being abandoned and started protesting which led to chain reactions down the line.

Littered about the park were some giant animal models of mostly prehistoric animals, and we noticed that there was a miniature railway but the train wasn’t running that day. There was a nicely set up bird pond where we chilled and watched the bird life for a little while.

The highlight of the trip for 10yo was getting to cuddle a koala (14yo had the opportunity to but chose not to take it due to being way too hot and bothered by then).

His description of what the koala felt like was as follws: “It had fur like Tali’s, and as thick as Austin’s, and a really big nose!”

Tali is my ridgey cross that we got as a staffy X mastiff, Austin is 14yo’s domestic medium haired kitten.

Whenever 10yo goes to the dentist, he always asks if he can have some of their gloves. Our dentist is amazing and happy to oblige him so he often comes back with a couple of blue gloves. On this occasion he decided to use it as a water balloon and possibly may have left it floating in a tub of water too, and was surprised by the outcome.

He’s decided he needs to try an experiment when he next gets some gloves as that was his last or second last one.

10yo requested a couple of trips to Scitech (both of which 14yo bailed on especially as we would soon be going there weekly for the homeschool classes they run in the labs) and we went. Both were shorter than we would have liked due to me needing to get back in time for school pickup, which took a fair bit of time and tantrums to get used to.

Scitech retained several old favourites:

One of the old things got a new twist when one of the staff members handed 10yo a plastic sheet to hide from the thermographic camera.

A new display involving pipes and air valves was hugely popular, especially as they used black lights.

The blacklight apparently also affected my mohawk XD

There was also a new light display thing that was controlled by a bunch of dials which kept 10yo occupied for a minute.

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We got partway through the Map Your World display before 10yo aborted. Even the partially completed AR map was pretty cool though.

10yo continued his chef aspirations by replicating and then modifying his sister’s easy guacomole recipe.

It was pretty good.

And we’d been saying every time we passed Perth Stadium (I’m so glad that’s what it’s called seeing as that’s what I’ve been calling it in my animation project even though I don’t remember if I placed it exactly where is actually is as at the time I wrote all the scripts I didn’t know it was going to be a real place XD) that we should check out the playground we could see near the river. We finally made it on a warm but not otherwise too hot in the grand scheme day.

Both the boys said they wanted to come back again and maybe bring their sister with them but neither were too keen on the bigger crowds that would come with the weekends, so I guess we’ll have to wait til an event brings us back again.

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