The year started off great with 16yo and I getting our jobs back at the kids' gym (they're "just" volunteer jobs but won't be too much longer).  A lot of stuff has changed, a couple of things are really not great, some stuff is fantastic, and some stuff is kind of wait and see.  As well as being put on for an introduction class and a group of level 3s, she was allowed to help with the Kindergym classes seeing as she wants to get into childcare.  This is going to make up the bulk of her homeschooling program alongside the monthly assignments.  She's been registered for OLNA and we should hopefully work out where she's going to sit it as that's happening sometime in the next couple of months.  

August started off really slow and cruisy and them ramped right up into September.

It started with the death of one of 13yo's fish. He was devastated as it had gotten sick but had looked like it was starting to recover before succumbing. We had a little funeral in the side yard, burying it under the rosemary bush.

17yo had another quarter life crisis (he has had at least one in the last two years) where he decided he needed to "get his life together" and once again asked for organisational tips (he has asked me previously for things that I have already told him about in trying to get them to learn my organisational hacks and how to research and experiment with their own). He asked me for a corkboard (full corkboard as I'd bought them corkboard/whiteboard combos previously, apparently it wasn't big enough for what he wanted to do) so he could pin things he wanted to organise on it. 15yo overheard and said the same.

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.

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.

During May, 12yo decided to  get into fruit sculpture, and made a ridiculous amount of stuff out of bananas.  Because I was really preoccupied with I can't remember what at the time, the only thing I caught a photo of was this "sword".

I did have time to make a trip to Spotlight to pick up some elastic and some fabric for 14yo to make a blanket thing that apparently only needs tying together.

I would love to say things are picking up but they're really not.  Issues are abounding, some of them standard teenage ones, some of them teenage politics I thought we might have a prayer of avoiding if we avoided using the school system (very naive thought there, because to completely avoid it I guess we'd have to exist in an insular community with only mostly like-minded individuals), a lot probably stemming from the other thing even though we're trying to both ignore it and deal with it as much as possible.

The smalls had a bit of an arty month.  12yo actually sat still long enough to twine a piece of blutack around a skewer (in fairness there was some mild distraction as he was watching Youtube at the same time and just wanted to do something with his hands while doing so) and in a completely separate session also started drawing DnD item and magic cards while waiting for a box that he'd bought to arrive.

At the end of January Homeschool Miscellany we were re-establishing routines and trying to get into good habits and making new plans.

Two of those things are somewhat working out for us.

I'm still struggling to go to bed on time x_x

There were a few unexpected shenanigans quite close together which have thrown me right off with AER and hive and training which is about normal, and in way too many cases excursion days were postponed as well.

One of the good things about The Big Reset (although the kids don't really feel it at the time) is the slow and very limited internet (my parents actually have a quota as they don't use nearly as much internet as we do or more specifically as the kids do), which means they tend to spend slightly less time on their devices.  The boys actually spent a few nights playing chess against each other and JJ, and Sprat taught them how to play a game with a Chinese name somewhat similar to Poker (the similarity that I could pick up being that you had similar collections of cards you could use).

I usually don't do December and January unless interesting things happen as December is usually write-off month (too many end of year things happening for anything to be effectively planned and even if it could be planned we'd be exhausted as normally around the end of year things we just want to chill) and January is planning month (because my organisational skills are that atrocious that I need an entire month to plan).

I thought I'd already done August Homeschool Miscellany but apparently I'd done July and collected photos for August but not actually written the post.  Oops.  So everything ended up getting grouped as I've been struggling this year.

It's no accident that October was left out, apparently we didn't do anything that I could include.

Goolugatup Heathcote Museum

We initially heard that there was a museum in the building of the Heathcote Cultural Precinct when we attended a relative's birthday party there.  The precinct was a mental institution in the 1920s for mildly afflicted people and was one of the pioneering ones that broke away from the methods that seem to result in buildings being haunted.

What we didn't know was that the museum was really, really tiny (one room) and we had to wander through the art gallery to get there.