May was pretty quiet and boring as well. Think we just ended up gaming most of the time (occasional bout of Skylanders with the small one, and a few rounds of Monopoly with everyone, and I think there was some Exploding Kittens in there somewhere as well). Magic and Pokemon cards were sorted (at least by colour and type, and further sorting in the case of the Magic cards depending on how pedantic people were, I think 13yo just sorts by colour and 9yo sorts by colour and type til he gets bored). As per usual when we’re stuck home there was a lot of docos, again mostly concentrated on Horrible Histories and David Attenborough. Very hard for other types of docos to get a look in against those.

We didn’t do much. There was a lot of Horrible Histories and David Attenborough documentaries on Netflix, a lot of anime, a lot of discussion of character stereotypes. 13yo went through a period of refusing to go to bed, and when confronted on why, good-naturedly joked well he is a teenager, he needs to be rebellious about something. I suggested that the stereotypical teen rebellion thing tended to happen because the children in question felt like they had no control of their lives due to spending large chunks of their day in school, then have to give up even more time on homework, and in order to make sure they’re getting the study stuff done the parents are obliged to restrict the fun stuff. He and his siblings however had due to the style of homeschooling we do, almost all the time in the world to do as they liked, and if he felt that bedtime or something else was cramping his style then he could simply bring it up and we could have a chat about it and either tell him why it had to be that way whether he liked it or not, or negotiate conditions that would work better for everyone. He agreed that it might be better to do that instead. The bigs wanted to decide their own bedtime and are doing so at a reasonable hour (though every now and again I have to poke them before I go to bed).

March kicked off with Perth’s first steemup. The kids got to have some interesting conversations with new friends and encouraged to continue blogging (except for 9yo who disappeared off to the pool for most of the thing). The steem colours I sported in my mohawk so everyone knew where to go are still in!

Two weeks after getting home we were back in Jurien Bay again, this time for the kids’ great nanna’s 90th birthday party. As usual we were only there overnight and stayed in a different beach cottage with a backyard nicely set up for kids. The kids spent the day we got there playing in the backyard for a little while before having showers and getting ready for the party that evening. 8yo taught their 6yo cousin how to play *Exploding Kittens * which the 6yo took a few games to learn and apparently told his mother he didn’t understand but he seemed to enjoy it as he kept wanting to play.

Early in December we realised we hadn’t been swimming for a while. After a hefty argument (JJ prefers swimming in fresh water, the bigs and I strongly prefer the beach and 8yo doesn’t care as long as it’s swimmable) we hit up Serpentine Falls with a friend and their kids. The first thing we noticed was that the blackberry bushes had been cleared out and when we got there the top carpark closer to the falls was closed, though there were some cars in there (either ignoring the fact the gate was supposed to be shut or perhaps they were in there before it had been shut).

The kids wanted to go trick or treating for Halloween, so we ended up doing some quick Halloween research and reading and decided that the proper way to do things was not to do the commercialised going around begging for candy but to give the neighbours candy. However we had no time to prepare for that and 10yo’s birthday was kind of vaguely in the vicinity so we decided to do a “spooky themed” birthday party instead.

8yo kicked off the month by discovering that bubble bath mixed with water is a much more effective bubble mix than detergent mixed with water, and that pipe cleaners are easily repurposed into bubble wands. I’m not sure whether he made that discovery on his own or was assisted or led by 10yo.

I originally intended to combine July, August and September into one post as I didn’t think I had kept track of enough material to be able to make a post each. As it turned out I was wrong (which is not unusual when it comes to the home ed front, I always think that I have been terribly slack any given month and find out we’ve done more than I thought). However some of the September stuff still got caught up in the July/August mashup so this is the rest of September that escaped.

July and August were a bit of a blur as some not fantastic events occurred which monopolised my thought processes. We got reacquainted with death when my last two cats died within two weeks of each other (the one before had died Christmas last year and we had also lost a guinea pig recently). There were some extended family dramas which didn’t involve us directly which fortunately resolved before getting down and dirty with the legal system became necessary rather than advisable. Sprat was up for the semester break which is always great and the kids and I had lots of interesting conversations. Unfortunately I can’t remember any of them.

Really nothing much happened this month, mostly because I did something to my neck which had me pretty much out of action for a couple of weeks and I spent most of it in bed, and then took it extremely easy for the rest of the month. Unlike Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, the types of plays written by Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripedes and Aristophanes (all of which the kids kind of know about and have a very passing interest in thanks to Horrible Histories) were not so interesting for children (and to be perfectly honest not doing too much for me either). 12yo has been reading our Manga Shakespeare collection again though, mostly Midsummer Night’s Dream which is a favourite of mine.