13yo's kitchen experiments continued, he made sticky date puddings with caramel sauce.

Was delicious warm with ice cream.  He made two of them because he loves making massive batches of anything for some reason.  Worked out alright as I think most if not everyone in the house likes sticky date pudding.

15yo and I decided we desperately needed a shoe rack so after dropping 17yo at TAFE we headed over to the KMart down the road and got a bamboo one.

It didn't end up getting put together til later that day and 15yo did most of it on her own but was struggling with a bit of it, and 17yo happened to be on his way to or from the kitchen, noticed and leant assistance.

The cat was "helping" too.

It came together nicely and is now by the door doing an amazing job.

_{it's so much easier to sweep the corridor now as I just have to sweep under the shoe rack rather than moving a lot of shoes around}

We really didn't do a lot in April because it kind of sucked.  Both of our dogs died within weeks of each other.  Everyone was pretty devastated, the kids had grown up with those dogs.

The big dog was an early birthday/Christmas present for me as I'd decided I wanted a dog.  The kids were 5, 3 and 1 at the time.

The small dog came to us three years later.  J's dog had since died and we were considering getting another puppy when a friend asked if we wanted another dog as her parents were downsizing and unable to keep all of their animals.  We said sure and after a trial run, the small dog moved in.

It was another stay home month as I got too caught up in project related things and kept not sleeping, and also continually failed at finding places that we could go while unvaccinated. We did stuff though.

Like going into the TAFE and finding out that 15yo could try to get into the Cert I course that 17yo is doing next semester in preparation for going into the early childhood course sometime next year.

_{and now continues the eternal struggle to make sure she's up to speed with at least maths which she has always struggled with, English will be fine from what I've seen of 17yo's work}

As a slightly more fun English and Maths project (with a healthy sprinkling of Theatre and Drama), I asked 13yo to design a DnD game we could play. He happily agreed but is still trying to come up with something.

After ending January on a high, I was looking forward to finding more expensive excursions that the kids would be interested in and working out what cheaper or free things I could sprinkle in between.

And then vaccine mandates dropped which basically meant we weren't "allowed" to do much of anything.  Fortunately the kids were still "allowed" to go to gymnastics and TAFE, and in that time 17yo managed to regain his backflip (he had it last year, then lost it in the second half of the year), and on the same night got the double.

This one was recorded after he'd done quite a few of them and I was too slow to catch the roundoff at the beginning, he doesn't usually stack at the end XD

The month opened with 13yo being inspired by Genshin Impact (a game that 15yo and I have been playing together that 13yo occasionally joins us in) and making a chicken and mushroom kebab, which is one of the food items that can be crafted or purchased in game.

There isn't an actual recipe to follow so he just skewered and lightly seasoned and pan fried them.  Was very delicious.

I don't know what happened to October either, aside from the roleplaying games continued (I have this vague idea that I will write about how roleplaying games are good for maths, drama and general language development one day).  I think we may have also started more hardcore development of my dice system.  12yo has been making suggestions and helping test mechanics.  October may have also been the month where I found out that 16yo was doing more algebra, because apparently he thinks he needs algebra for the TAFE course he's thinking of enrolling in.  Not sure how much he's done as I think he's gotten himself a new Khan Academy account instead of resetting the password for his existing one so I'll have to try to remember to check that up when I'm compiling the report for the moderator meeting.

September was States month and it felt unusually close to Regionals because it was (we had the slightly awkward situation of that we needed to put people forward for states before we had the results from regionals to make sure they'd actually qualified, and to add chaos to the confusion, because it had been another unprecedented year, people were allowed to apply for states if they hadn't done regionals (there were a number of people that missed out due to being sick or having to quarantine).

I forgot to mention, over badge test and regionals, 16yo learned how to make chips in a commercial deep fryer from one of the people he would accept chips from and helped out on regionals and states weekends.  He makes a great bucket of chips.  Below is one he handed me during a break.  We hung out at the door I guard before he headed back to the canteen to get ready for the between-round rush.

Mild content warning: occasional swearing and mild adult themes

We had a slight derailment right at the outset as S was unable to make the session.  I only do character driven stories so players not being able to make sessions can make things fall apart, so normally we would just skip (I had previously tried to encourage the kids to make Redcaps that we could use in a casual drop-in/out filler game as a Redcap gang lends itself well to that, plus they could get any murderhobo/random dickishness/silly out, but the older boys had decided "Changeling is cringe").  However in this case seeing as it was early on, I managed to restructure stuff in my head (and later on in my notes) enough to postpone S to the next session.