The year started off great with 16yo and I getting our jobs back at the kids’ gym (they’re “just” volunteer jobs but won’t be too much longer). A lot of stuff has changed, a couple of things are really not great, some stuff is fantastic, and some stuff is kind of wait and see. As well as being put on for an introduction class and a group of level 3s, she was allowed to help with the Kindergym classes seeing as she wants to get into childcare. This is going to make up the bulk of her homeschooling program alongside the monthly assignments. She’s been registered for OLNA and we should hopefully work out where she’s going to sit it as that’s happening sometime in the next couple of months.

As is normal for us, November kind of slowly ground to a halt as there was a rather large thing to take care of and then we focused hard on/got roped into helping with end of year stuff, and December was pretty much a write-off. 15yo worked through a Netflix documentary series about F1 racing as her boyfriend is really into it so she was trying to learn a little more about it. I watched a couple of episodes with her and she told me a bit about the boyfriend’s favourite team and favourite driver and a few of the other drivers, saying that now she at least knew who he was talking about when he was excitedly babbling about them like they were friends she should know. We also marvelled at the pit crews basically disassembling and reassembling a car in seconds.

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).

This month was just as action packed as the previous one. There was one more excursion with the parents, extended family and Up Close and Local Tours but minus 17yo (who was feeling a bit run down and decided to play it paranoid) to Bunbury, where we stopped by a little cafe with its own little adorably put together food garden. After that it was off to the Dolphin Discovery Centre.

August started off really slow and cruisy and them ramped right up into September. It started with the death of one of 13yo’s fish. He was devastated as it had gotten sick but had looked like it was starting to recover before succumbing. We had a little funeral in the side yard, burying it under the rosemary bush. 17yo had another quarter life crisis (he has had at least one in the last two years) where he decided he needed to “get his life together” and once again asked for organisational tips (he has asked me previously for things that I have already told him about in trying to get them to learn my organisational hacks and how to research and experiment with their own). He asked me for a corkboard (full corkboard as I’d bought them corkboard/whiteboard combos previously, apparently it wasn’t big enough for what he wanted to do) so he could pin things he wanted to organise on it. 15yo overheard and said the same.

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.

15yo and I decided we desperately needed a shoe rack so after dropping 17yo at TAFE we headed over to the KMart down the road and got a bamboo one. It didn’t end up getting put together til later that day and 15yo did most of it on her own but was struggling with a bit of it, and 17yo happened to be on his way to or from the kitchen, noticed and leant assistance.

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.

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.

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.