WARNING: there are fake wounds made of Vaseline, flour and red food colouring about halfway through this post.

Broke the habit!

For now.

My head is still all over the place and and trying to get and keep organised is presenting its usual massive challenge, exacerbated by the fact the children have been staggering being exhausted for no apparent reason lately (a possible reason is growth spurts, because they're lethargic and sleep a lot and suddenly they're bigger, especially the boys).

July was pretty cruisy but as everything is pretty much back to normal (I think we're still meant to be social distancing as the marks in checkout lines and the enlarged aisles in bigger stores are still present but seeing as we've never had community transmission ever more and more and more people seem to be forgetting/ignoring this) we've been doing more.

The garden has been doing fantastic and my little nephew keeps asking to come over so he can raid.

I think I've inadvertently set that precedent I was trying to avoid x_x I blame covid.

During the period of "self isolation" (we were advised to not go out unless it was for essential purposes such as grocery shopping but full lockdown was never enforced), aside from occasionally trying to push bookwork (which is always destined for failure when everyone hates it so much), we all ended up just doing our own thing. 

For 15yo it was endless gaming and random dives into rabbit holes on various topics which he would then come out to discuss with us (mostly current affairs though we've also had some crazy discussions on philosophy and ethics that I've usually handballed to JJ because he's done a lot more of those things, most recent ones being stem cell research and the morality of the same actions in different contexts).

13yo spent a lot of time writing fanfics, learning video editing, drawing, making cosplay items and engaging in various shenanigans.

If you know that I only clump months if at least one of them has been quiet/lazy what does this tell you? XD

_{I also did it at the end of last year I hope that didn't set a precedent >_>}

Everything kind of completely fell apart in October.  12yo had caught everything under the sun in Term 3 and so had missed a fair chunk of it.  At the beginning of Term 4 she continued insisting that she loved school and still wanted to go, but two weeks in I could count on one hand the number of times she had actually gone.  She kept insisting she was "sick" or "too tired" but would always be better just in time for gymnastics.  Things eventually came to a head when we had a massive blowout as I told her if she was really that sick then she was not going to gymnastics so she could recover properly and she told me to pull her out of school so she could go to gym (a threat I'd made a few times previously but hadn't done because I give too many chances).  I tried to get her to be reasonable and told her she could go to gym, and then she had to go to school for the rest of the week.  If she wanted to quit after that she was to tell me on the weekend and I

Comp season is one of our quieter periods and between that and juggling school transportation and crammed work days we got even less done than usual.  I was going to put together a compilation video of all the routines but some combination of my phone and computer has been giving me an inordinate amount of trouble has made getting photos and videos off it way harder than it should be in this day and age and I've given up on that for now.  That is one of the main reasons why I'm so horribly behind on hs misc.

10yo spent some pocket money on a crystal growing kit from Australian Geographic and grew it.

This is primarily for my boys (14yo is currently interested in law, 10yo in marine biology).  We use Khan Academy because that was what was freely available when I started looking into homeschooling resources.

First and foremost

Everything requires basic literacy and numeracy.  So get through the high school maths on KA (start at your grade level, if it's too hard, play down, if it's too easy, play up, if you're in high school/over grade 8 and it's too hard, keep dropping til you can do it, then work back up).

The mess that has been this year continued along with my sustained failing to manage one in school and two out.  I've ended up palming most of the school-related stuff off to JJ, which has mostly been parent/teacher meetings and he's supposed to be helping her with homework and doing the admin stuff too but somehow I'm still getting stuck with that (guess the 12yo is just used to me dealing with most things).

10yo got into making paper planes again, he was happily off on his own once I'd reminded him how to make them.  As he was occasionally cutting our printing paper into squares for some of the plane designs, he decided not to let the off-cuts go to waste and started making smaller and smaller planes.  I think he remembered doing something similar last year.

By necessity we ended term 1 pretty quietly with the Scitech homeschooling lessons.  Occasionally one or both boys missed some lessons due to colds, which I didn't realise at the time was a taste of things to come.

After one of the lessons both of them got to, 10yo decided to blow some pocket money at the Scitech shop on some compound eye glasses.  There was some hilarity when both of them had a go with it the first time.

One of the last two lessons involved programming an extremely basic AI to win an extremely basic game, and the paperwork task was to graph the robot's wins.

As February was ending I suspected Term 1 was going to be a write-off for the boys and unfortunately I wasn't wrong.  An additional and unforeseen problem with the school run was that even though it's short it seems to be further destroying my problem shoulder, so I really didn't want to drive anywhere, which given the time restrictions caused by school and the amount of pain I was in basically meant we got stuck with the Scitech homeschooling lessons I'd booked at the beginning of term, and me imposing 10am-12noon as "no non-educational videos and games" time if we were staying home.  They could still use their screens but had to be doing Khan Academy or making something, or doing any off-screen activities.

February was confusing.

I thought I had everything worked out.  I was going to show 12yo how to get to and from high school for a couple of weeks, then cut her a key and leave her to it and just continue as normal with the boys.

I didn't realise a) that this would be tiring and b) that 12yo kept insisting on being accompanied past the two weeks and both her and JJ were having epic freakouts about "what if she gets on the wrong bus" on the way home, as the bus route couldn't be easy and just reverse, the opposite route goes in a different direction.  I had told 12yo how to get back to the main road and where would be safe to cross and which bus numbers to take, but anyway.