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:

We took a fishing trip to Jurien but once again were not able to go out in the boat due to the howling winds.  The boys went fishing off the jetty, JJ caught a blowfish and the same seafull four times.  I caught some godrays and the kids checked out a sundial.  There wasn't enough sun to see what time the sundial thought it was, 11yo tried to take a guess based on the position of the sun while explaining how the sundial worked to 6yo.

We've had dramas with the big two for the last few months simply refusing to do their bookwork and occasionally also refusing to do anything I could use in place of that (including things that they get enthused about such as making their own books or building models, sounds too much like hard work and they'd much rather play games and chat with their friends on Skype all day).  We've had some serious chats about entitlement and how no matter what they decide to do in life, no matter how much they enjoy it, at some point there is going to be a hard slog.

Our year started fantastically with being able to go to a performance of The Lion King Broadway Musical courtesy of mother in law who bought us tickets.

We were up in the nosebleed section so couldn't see fine details of costumes or clear facial expressions but got an awesome view of everything going on on the stage and around the theatre (as the performers didn't restrict themselves to the stage).

December is always an odd time of year due to having to wind up kids activities, business for the year and organising whatever is going on for Christmas so I rarely have much homeschooly to write about.

The kids had their gymnastics end of year performance, the theme was "Back to the 80s".  Costumes were fantastic, the performances were great and I completely failed at taking any good photos.  The Christmas party followed directly afterwards including a visit from Santa.

At some point 6yo figured out how the juicer went together and proceeded to chop up apples to juice.  I came out when I heard the knife rhythmically chopping on the bench.  He was using it safely so I put down the chopping board, told him he needed to use that rather than cutting directly on the bench and supervised from a distance.