Due to stuff (some it was the parents coming up to visit for a couple of weeks, some is that business has picked up dramatically), I haven't been keeping track of the homeschooly stuff.  Also we've been finding better things to do than sitting and doing bookwork, so it's a really good thing that's not the core of our homeschooling program (I need to write one of those for next year by the way, and also a booklist).  So here's some photos of things it occurred to me to point a camera at.

We spent most of the last week recovering from whatever plague we had and trying to get back into the bookwork.  What this meant was that we stayed home all week and I let the kids do whatever books they wanted which meant Ruan only did Reading Eggs books all week when they are supposed to pick different subjects.

Which reminds me I do need to buy them new books for next year.

My suspected real life Crazy Dog House on the Cliff allegedly contains a museum these days.  For various reasons we've never quite manged to get to it.  Apparently neither have my parents, but as it turns out the opening hours are really awkward and you need to either be a tourist or taking time off work to go to it within the very short opening hours (Thursday and Friday 10-3).

Mum, the kids and I rocked up yesterday (Tuesday) and it was nice to see the place had been cleaned up a LOT.  Last time Josh and I were here we had wanted to explore the outbuildings, but they had been horribly overgrown and potentially hazardous so we'd mostly refrained.

It's been mostly overcast with bouts of rain so the last week has been kind of slack and kind of relaxed.  We've been three times to two different beaches (though I didn't take photos of the second beach partially because it was late when we went and I wasn't sure how good the photos would turn out in that light, and mostly because I was going to be swimming as well, could have given it to my dad though), one loopy nature trail (which was slightly longer than I thought but a decent walk nonetheless, and we didn't go to the lookout because it was probably too long a hike for the kids) and a few epic Minecraft sessions.  I haven't got as much art done as I was hoping but bits and pieces are getting done.  The kids have been watching a LOT of Pokemon, a couple of other movies and reading books borrowed from the library (independently during the day in the case of the bigs; they each have a book on dinosaurs and Tao has one on space and Ru has a cookbook in addition to bo

Erm...note: these are actually notes for me so I only have to do other similar systems once (hopefully), not a bek's guide.  If they come in useful for someone else to follow great, no guarantees blah blah blah.

System:

Horize Clevo W110ER from Logical Blue One (on sale at time of writing) AU$919 with 3 year warranty

Specs

Right up at the beginning of the week we spent half a day out.  Morning was pretty cruisy, and then fell over a bit as we ran late to get to Nanna's and then slightly later again as the road I usually take was unexpectedly closed and I don't know my way around the area well enough to reliably navigate around the roadblock (pulled in at a medical centre and utilised the trusty GPS).  While I was in the meeting (which ran unexpectedly long) the kids played down by the river and made some new friends, Ru with a pair of sisters aged 6.5yo and 4.5yo and Tao with a gaggle of boys who were a few years older but they all played Minecraft so everything was cool (he apparently invited them over for a Minecraft party, I told him their parents would probably not want to drive out so far).  Back at the grandparents' they didn't want to leave immediately so we waited out rush hour and Pop let them play with his walkie talkies for a bit.

Had to temporarily drop theAbysmal dates as I got completely and utterly lost.  Stupid Gregorian calendar and it's shifting days ;) I'll try to pick it up again next week.

And just as you're enjoying the nice blissful month of no weekly posts from bek, we're starting again! Anyway we're about midyear so this is part catch-up and part vague plan for the rest of the year.

We had one week of staggered flu (nothing too serious, just lots of sleeping, lethargy and general blarginess) followed by a week of gastro (again not too serious in the grand scheme, the kids were a bit lethargic but not listless, the biggest issue was the washing machine choosing to break down immediately before the gastro hit and it was out of action for a couple of weeks), followed by a short week (thanks to a public holiday) of me taking it easy because I was exhausted from the previous two, followed by a week of Josh catching a really bad flu and then a week of me catching a much milder version of that flu which technically only lasted a day, I just chose to take the rest of the week easy.  We did have a few bouts of okay or mostly okay in that period fortunately.

This weekly stuff is tiring.  Seriously who reads this anyway? May just start hiding them as I still kind of need to write them.  Anyway.

Bit of a slow week this week as the kids all caught a cold and I spent a couple of days heroically fending it off.

Our garlic bulb has grown quite large but is now looking a bit limp and sad.  Got the kids to draw it again (still have to find where Tao put his first diagram).  Tao's writing is improving a lot.  Got him to work out the perimeter and area (both of just the floor and the entire building) of a building he was making in Minecraft.

Ru wrote out a list of stuff she was planning to do on Friday (art gallery followed by three picks each on the tv), which she has been doing semi-regularly, usually in her "office" (an upside down box in the playroom with a stack of papers on it and a sign reading "RUAN'S OFFICE".