March was kind of insane like February was as 12yo started doing FreeG and we started vaguely prepping for our somewhat unexpected April trip to Christmas Island and 8yo had diagonistic-related appointments, and it was crazy to the point where I didn't take notes on our random interesting conversations for this thing like I usually do, so it's just photos.

12yo made himself a riot shield type affair out of a box and almost an entire spool of twine (which 10yo was rather unimpressed about as it was her twine and she didn't realise he was going to use the whole thing):

We do an awesome impression of having a pretty quiet month on the homeschooling front, but what was actually going on was getting used to "in term" stuff starting up and trying to make some crazy logistics work out.  We ended up dropping swimming lessons altogether as all three kids are watersafe as far as swimming pools go (anywhere involving tides is going to have to be dealt with experience).

After eating a lot of avocado and guacomole, we decided to have a crack at sprouting some of the avocado seeds.  According to the instructions the bigs looked up, we needed two skewer the seeds on toothpicks and suspend them in water for 6-8 weeks or something to that effect.

10yo found an experiment on Youtbe that she wanted to try, which involved dropping hot water into cold water rapidly to see if they mixed.  So we would be able to see if there was any mixing going on, she colour coded the water with food colouring after boiling the hot water.

Straight off the bat, nobody likes doing bookwork, not even the primary homeschooling parent (that would be yours truly).  I have the books mainly so I know what they're technically supposed to be doing if they were at school (and it would be a handy syncing device should they ever decide to go to school or if I need to chuck them in there for whatever reason).  So I'll be getting English, Maths and Science books from my usual source for these things once I have money to do so.  We have been doing ChoreMonster on another homeschooler's recommendation which has been working out better for longer than other things I've tried.  However the bigs are getting to an age where I want them to be a bit more responsible with how they manage their time and the things that need to do (rather than me telling them what they should be doing and then nagging them because they

We didn't get to do our Solstice Wreath this year due to a little more craziness than usual.  But other stuff got done.

10yo figured out how to make fingerless gloves using her loomband loom and wool after watching a few Youtube videos:

She has since either given this one to her best friend or made her best friend one and there has been a request to teach another homeschoolie how to make them.

7yo made a "quarry" with some collected rocks (not sure where they're from as they collect rocks and never label them...)

We haven't really made good use of our zoo passes this year.  Hopefully this will be remedied next year.  10yo stole my phone to take a number of photos of things she considered cute and as we ventured into the Asian rainforest to see the Komodo dragon and the red panda it reminded me that there are a few sections we don't get to very often and we should probably make the effort to go into them.

I spent most of October being out with shingles and a chest infection.  JJ managed to take some time off work during the worst of it but after that he was juggling full time work, homeschooling and generally running the house so don't think he really remembers specifics of any of the homeschooling stuff they did.

Our bees swarmed, and  made this nice ball that dangled off one of the fruit trees for a couple of days.  We got a relative who is a bee keeper to come pick them up.  In the meantime the kids were told to avoid that area, be generally careful while playing outside and I think had some bee-themed lessons from Youtube as both the boys started telling me a lot about bees and hornets shortly afterwards.

11yo: the drones are the male bees.  They sit around and eat honey, then they mate and die.
7yo: don't they store honey?
11yo: the drones are the ones with wings.
7yo: some bees don't have wings? O_o
11yo: OH! I was thinking about ants XD
7yo: bees have ants? o_O

Apparently doing bookwork with Dad is much more interesting than doing the same bookwork with Mum.  I have handed off 11yo to JJ for maths as he's too advanced for me, so J has been teaching him physics and chemistry and other related things.  They started off in the computer room, and then 9yo decided to join them doing English.  As he was passing the computer room 7yo happened to look in, I told him not to go in there as they were doing bookwork and he decided then that he wanted to do bookwork too.

Easiest time I've ever had getting them to do bookwork.

There were a couple of birthdays this month which of course meant birthday cards had to be made.

We welcomed a new baby cousin.

And spent a fair bit of time with my parents who were visiting.  11yo made a peg sculpture.

The highlight of the month was the PCYC gymnastics regionals which 9yo qualified for.  She got gold on beam, silver on vault, bronze on floor and for the all-rounder, and 4th on bar.  Additionally the team won gold.