Do you know how hard it is to do a coast to hills transect with three kids under 12?

Not that hard actually if you go with their interest levels.  I would have liked them to observe how the vegetation and soil changed as we went from the eastern outer metro to the coastal part of the Wheatbelt.  They were mostly interested in getting to the beach so we just ended up pointing out sand dunes that were covered in vegetation and having quick chats about why the vegetation is important for holding the sand together, and how the soil colour changed from browny-red clay to sand to white sand.

8yo has made it into the "Sunflowers" group which is a group of Level 2 girls who the coaches decide are good enough for competitions.  Level 3 is the official competition level for the PCYC clubs (I have no idea about in general) so the Level 2 girls get to go along to the comps for fun and get a medal based on their overall scores.  8yo participated in her first comp and got a silver.

One of JJ's friends recently hosted a science themed birthday party for his 7yo, complete with science experiments.

First up was lemon batteries.  They had fun poking various pieces of metal into the lemons and then tried to light a small LED from it.

Unfortunately the lemons didn' put out enough power to light the LEDs on thi occasion (it had apparently worked when JJ's friend was testing out suitable experiments for the party).  They moved on to the next thing while JJ used a metal coat hanger to skewer some of the lemons into a parallel to see what kind of charge he could get and apparently we'd need quite a lot of lemons to get one small LED to turn on.

10yo: can I do memrise?
Me: no. Go to sleep.
10yo: por favor?
Me: no. Go to sleep.
10yo: can I go give Daddy a cuddle?
Me: no. Go to sleep.
10yo: por favor?
Me: na go'i ko sipna
6yo: what does that mean?
Me: no. go to sleep!

I wanted to wrangle the permission attitudinal in there but couldn't recall it off the top of my head. Also needed an .i but eh.

This house is more Menagerie than The Menagerie was.  Newest additions from left to right: Popcorn, Lucius and Nightshade (which may actually be Knight Shade as I suspect it was named after a Skylander), belonging to 8yo, 10yo and 6yo respectively.  We've had them for three days so far and they're settling in slowly.  Cats completely do not care about them.  Tali has sniffed them both in the cage and in my hand and been great.  Angus just wants to bite them. Which then of course stirs Tali up and he wants to play too! Working on that -_-

I'm doing a reasonable job doing everything else and an atrocious job blogging.

Perth Zoo

Photos from the last couple of weeks.  After 10yo had sent off an enquiry email to WAFFS, they put is in contact with a lovely lady in the area who let us play with her ferrets and answered all the questions we had and then said we should head up to the AGM the following day if we didn't have any plans as people brought their ferrets to these things.  We didn't have anything on that morning (unfortunately parents in law were off travelling so we couldn't visit them while we were in the area) so we trotted along to go have a look.

The City of Gosnells recently had its Homegrown Festival, but due to many clashes of things the only thing we ended up making was the Liddelow Homestead Open Day.  It has a really cool corridor.

There was also a stove which the kids didn't initially recognise as such, we spent a few minutes talking about what it might be before I told them what it was, and we then discussed how one might control the temperature of the stove when cooking.

The day before we flew out to Christmas Island, we went on an excursion to the Art Gallery of Western Australia.  They accommodate homeschool groups easily and the programs the kids did were great and seem to have been enjoyed by all.  To make running things easier for the staff, the kids had been divided into pre-primary to Year 3 (5-8yos) and year 4+ (9 and older).  The older group went for their activity first while the younger one went on the tour.  The younger group got split into two and 8yo, then 5yo and I ended up in a tiny little group consisting of ourselves and 8yo's then-6yo friend.  The tour guide got peppered with a billion questions as both girls are very interested in art and did a great job fielding them and the additional and often random questions from then-5yo.

Minimal text, many photos, some videos.  Mishmash of scenic, happysnaps and homeschooling stuff coz that's how we roll.  Grab a drink and a snack before commencing.

First couple of weeks...

The airport wait wasn't terribly exciting but at least there were planes to watch being loaded, taking off and landing.

Big asam tree across the road as seen from my bed.  It's always good to be home.