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.

Right at the beginning of July we went to Melbourne for 4 days to visit my 97yo grandmother.  While we were there we also went to check out the city and Mum decided that we may as well go and have our first snow experience seeing as we were there in winter, and generously paid for a private tour.

As it turned out the other 7yo's pre-soaked pea (near the green stick) hadn't "drownded", it had just been taking its sweet time sprouting.

He's been doing a pretty good job of remembering to water them every few days with little to no prompting/reminding.  He also decided to do some of his iPad work with an added challenge, while "disguised" in the box he'd cut holes in to make a robot/box troll/etc kind of outfit for himself.

11yo's drawing of Sans from Undertale on the whiteboard

JJ and 7yo playing Shadows Over Camelot.  11yo and 9yo are off frame waiting for their turn.  I'm obviously taking the photo.  The game is fun and a little bit involved and is cooperative rather than competitive (unless someone turns out to be the traitor!).

Artificial rock climbing at the PCYC fundraiser.  Didn't get a lot of photos as we got rained out!

11yo went to a birthday party for one of his team mates and won a dancing competition not because he's any good at dancing but because he was full of confidence and energetically went at it where a lot of his friends were too scared to even get on the floor.

7yo got one of those hatching dinosaur eggs for his birthday.

The fully "grown" thing is now sitting on his shelf with all his other dinosaurs.

I organised to meet up with JJ's family (parents, sister and her family) at Whiteman Park.  We met up at the pretty large and cool playground that had a pretty tall slide tucked into one corner: