One of the things about not learning in an institution is accepting that the stuff taught and learned in institutions isn't the grand authority on all that's worth learning.  I know this, but sometimes I don't really know it.  Like on her day, 11yo said she wanted to get her nails done.

My immediate response was "pick something educational".

I'm not sure why mouths sometimes just randomly fire off before engaging the logic part first as not only would it make a lot of things so much easier, it would probably also make the world a better place in general.  11yo has spent a couple of years studying makeup artistry, nails were part of that, so we would learn how nails got done professionally.  Also, I got her to research the nail places at the shopping centre we were going to in order to get some idea of prices.  As it turned out none of them had prices on their websites (which is really annoying) so we had to do actual legwork.

The kids wanted to go trick or treating for Halloween, so we ended up doing some quick Halloween research and reading and decided that the proper way to do things was not to do the commercialised going around begging for candy but to give the neighbours candy.  However we had no time to prepare for that and 10yo's birthday was kind of vaguely in the vicinity so we decided to do a "spooky themed" birthday party instead.

10yo did up a master list comprising of other lists, and lists for food shopping and various party supplies.  JJ took care of the food as he usually does and Nanna and I split shifted picking up party supplies over a couple of weeks.

One of the things 10yo had wanted was a banner so she and 8yo worked on making one up:

[imported from livejournal and backdated]

[this post got a lot of interesting/amusing comments mostly about people apparently annoyed by my decision to use Lojban as the IAL (international auxiliary language) for AEfter Ragnarok - bit sad to lose them]