January Homeschool Miscellany

• home education

The Christmas Island trip continued with all its fun and educational opportunies. 15yo found a new “pet” at Lily Beach when we trooped over for our annual campfire.

It was put back down somewhere safe after the photo.

Sprat and 17yo mudskippered around the very shallow water looking for fish.

It didn’t take long for 17yo to come scurrying after my phone.

A number of shots and videos later, she returned the phone saying she didn’t think the (old, somewhat cracked and worn) case was waterproof anymore.

I very quickly (mostly removing bits that were too fast, and also switching the clips up a little because I liked both the beginning and ending of the second one) edited the two videos I found into one.

After swimming we ate dinner, with 15yo happy to show off his steak preparation skills to the extended family.

We had a couple of unexpected guests for dinner. The thrush scavenged some meat and salad scraps and the crabs were basically handed some meat offcuts a short distance away from the gazebo so they wouldn’t come all the way in and be a hazardous trip hazard (those legs and claws can get through coconuts after all).

At some point a firepit had been installed on the beach to make the campfires a bit safer. The boys in particular had a great time helping build it and couldn’t resist constantly poking it.

And where there’s a campfire, there’s smores.

And shortly afterwards shenanigans as 19yo decided he needed to try usinng a burning brand as a sword with J and I yelling at him about scattering embers.

Christmas Island is probably the only place in the world where entire roads get shut down for decent chunks of the day thanks to crab migrations. They are almost successful attempts to try to constrain their crossing points to try to reduce carnage and amount of road needing to be closed.

17yo hates bushwalking but will come out for walks and such on Christmas Island because we’re doing some family trip to some beach that we can only hike through the jungle for or because Sprat is coming out for her mostly-daily walk.

The midnight flowers opened up while we were there and the kids got to see them in person again. I can’t remember if the kids saw them in person the last time we were up, times before that they would have gone to bed before they opened.

We decided to go to the South Point Ruins again and this time 19yo (who refused to wake up to come last time). I think they had added some more information signs and a bigger and better version of the map that had been there previously but of course I didn’t think to take photos of them to see if they had actually been there from last time.

Apparently the first thing that needs to be done is balancing on the old warped railway tracks (this may have become somewhat of a tradition).

The boys struggled a little (including the one who’s a gymnast), meanwhile the girl gymnast who is used to prancing about on a beam couldn’t understand what all the fuss and wobbling was about.

15yo was fascinated by a cactus he found growing in a wall and after investigating how it had gotten into that state, he of course had to work out if the spines were sharp.

Meanwhile 17yo was pointing out the several occ health and safety hazards in the area and all the accidents waiting to happen.

And taking photos of 15yo in the “jail” (we’re still not sure what it actually is).

We then descended the very steep stairs with 17yo concerned about her no-longer-broken-knee to go to the video game ruins.

Being so much taller now, the boys decided that they were going to jump in and have a closer look around (the girl did not as it was muddy down there and she was wearing white shoes and may have been worried about being able to get back up). I did ask how they were going to get back up and 19yo demonstrated.

15yo couldn’t do that but did climb out with the assistance of some rubble and sturdy plants.

We had a bit more of a poke around and wanted to drove down the track a little more but same as last time decided it was too wet and overgrown and that we should probably be heading back to do dinner prep and whatnot.

We grabbed coconuts on the way out.

I joked that JJ and 19yo should have just done a two-high but they both only know how to do it in theory and the ground there wasn’t the best option for learning.

On one of the days when the water was a bit rough at the Cove we went to check out a beach that we pretty much never go to down the cliff from the Visitor’s Centre (there are stairs going down).

After a quick look around we opted to not attempt swimming there as it was still rough, it’s all rocks for a couple of metres into the water and then it drops off.

On one of the many occasions where we were at the CLA for lunch, we decided to see if the Chinese Museum was open, as we remembered it being all of two rooms big so it wouldn’t take long to get around it, and the kids had been really tiny last time we went.

It took about as long as I remember it taking before even though everyone looked at everything as they can all read faster now.

19yo loves jetty jumping and does it whenever he can whenever we go to the beach. This time round he managed to convince 15yo to jump as well (think the deal was he would make more of an effort to use 15yo’s actual name rather than a childhood nickname if 15yo jumped).

After he finally managed to psyche himself up enough to jump (which took about 20min), 15yo decided that now that he’d tried that (I’m pretty sure he has done it once before) he never needed to do it again.

And 19yo has been using his proper name since.

Our island trip ended with a fun photoshoot around the new murals at The Barracks (none of which I felt were postable mostly due to the glare off the very shiny paint), 17yo finding a spot to do her straddle hold, and the boys “waterbending” after hoping for a final swim at the Cove and being unable to because the tide was slightly too high.

Then we got home and time (which felt really slow and sometimes stopped when we were on the island) came crashing back in and despite trying to hit the ground running I ended up basically being perpetually late for anything that wasn’t a work shift or appointment.

This work by ryivhnn is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License