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.

Might try to do these as monthly things rather than semi-random ones.

Firstly, we are chick central again.  About three clutches with 7-10 chicks in each one.  Chappie's family want some of the naked necks.  This was the first lot.  Idiot hen had gone next door to brood, kids heard the cheeping and went next door to investigate.  Neighbour was astonished as she hadn't even realised they were there behind the shed, and just as well they'd only hatched that morning as she'd been dogsitting and the dog had left earlier in the day.

The picture of them is as day olds, they're now a week or so and feathering up.

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.

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

Perth Zoo

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.

Because I don't blog it nearly as often as I should.

Tao's reading is now well and truly away.  He reads everything from street and shop signs that we're passing to books.  His current favourite book is his Pokemon Black & White Handbook that Sprat bought for him. It's not unusual for him to wander around the house with it, have it open on his lap while watching tv, and sometimes he'll be multiscreening, watching tv, playing Pokemon White on his DS and have the book open beside him for reference.  I've known for a while and I think both Tao and Josh are discovering that he can actually parse what he considers large blocks of text when he wants to.

Everything that happened after the dangers of parking your ship next to a cliff, which I would have posted if my sites hadn't been playing silly buggers.  Everything is okay now, which means I'll be posting about as much as I was inclined to post before.

Weird looking spider

Have I scared off the arachnophobes yet? It's okay, this is the only spider photo this post.  I have no idea what kind of spider it is; I don't recall seeing it when I was growing up.  Sprat seems to think it's fairly recently common.

These are all more or less straight off the camera (aside from any incidental modifications that happen because I resized them down to 500px on the long side from over 4000) because I'm lazy and currently trying to make presentable some lion dance photos I took under bizarro lighting that a complete non-photographer like me has no idea how to deal with.

Yesterday, we went out for a drive.  Christmas Island isn't the biggest island in the world, if you point the car's nose down the road and drive without stopping along any major track you'll end up back where you started in about half an hour.

We went out in an exploratory mood and took many photos.  Of course all the photos Josh took while we were out and about were with Kerchunk and nothing on Snap so there's nothing I can post.  We'll just have to go out again and take more when the battery charger arrives.

I'm rather annoyed with myself that it didn't occur to me to take a photo of at least one of the egg laden robber crabs that we skirted around in our trek.  Not doing so had something to do with rain and being in the middle of the jungle and swarms of mosquitoes.  Yeh I know, excuses, excuses :)

stock photo from LindaMarieB

I just haven't been writing about it.

Last week, Tao drew a picture of Venom from Spiderman with black whiteboard marker on paper, including sounding out the name and checking with Josh after writing it out.

This week just gone has been crazy.

[imported from livejournal and backdated]