October/November/December Homeschooling Miscellany

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 could pull her out and she could go back to homeschooling, if she wanted to keep going then she had better have as close to a perfect attendance as possible for the rest of the term, and if she didn’t go the following day then I was pulling her out that day.

Skate ramp tests and first honey harvest

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The skate ramp is skatable!

Okay so this is a slightly older picture but it was a good opener :P

All but one of the backs are up (the thing that will prevent skaters and skateboards from ending up in the raised bed or in the neighbour’s yard) and the whole thing is now covered in both layers of skin and has been reinforced and all those good things. Now it just needs a paint job (and I know someone who is good at painting that I would like to rope in to help).

New camera, more aquaponics photos

We finally bought a NAS, it’s living next to the router (which makes logical sense as it has to plug into the router). I’m currently copying all the music and photos onto it and will probably delete them off my computer as part of my cleanup process (moving a bunch of Stuff off the 250Gb ssd to the 2Tb sata).

Moving the iPhoto database was nice and easy (drag, hold down alt when opening iPhoto, selecting where the library had been moved to, delete the original file), and it kind of needed to go elsewhere as it’s 53Gb and going to blow out as I’m shooting RAW.

Life and !schooling in 2012

Apparently there was a bit of a kerfuffle in the moderator department, which meant I completely forgot about the moderation until the new moderator rocked up on my door towards the end of my work period. Oops. Fortunately I work from home and can make up hours easy, and I hadn’t gone out to pick up my shiny new computer yet, though I had gotten dressed to do so. So all she saw was that my place is a mess, which is about normal and I don’t clean up for anyone!

Insects and a gappy boy

It’s all happening. The garden is going nuts, we’re going to go through a stage of not having to buy so many veges, and we’re turning into those old people that like pottering around their gardens (though I don’t do much of any garden work as I seem to have a knack for killing plants).

This morning, as we were going around to see how the garden was going (the zuchinni is huge, all zuchinni plants have gotten bigger since the last post), when we encountered this fellow practising kung fu on a mulberry leaf:

Photos. Lots of them.

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Not quite intelligent enough for a coherent post, so have lots of captioned photos instead.

4yo gets 3 birthday celebrations for her half-decade; one with us, one with JJ’s side, one on Christmas Island when we get there

Photos from the garden

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A friend introduced the kids to the My Little Pony remake some time ago and with the starting of this blog post this song stuck in my brain (had no help whatsoever from the kids watching it a few times ;).

So I’m a bit late for “tomorrow spring is here”, we’re about halfway through the first month of spring as humans like to count it. I think spring came a bit earlier than September. As far as I’m concerned it’s spring when the weather and the flowers say it’s spring.

Work, Wannabe and other projects and a dash of unschooling

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Firstly, what in the hell is with the life category?!

I’ve been (very slowly!) importing livejournal entries so I can replace missing photos. Very minor regret that I didn’t bother skimming through my shadowshifter livejournal before I deleted it as I probably had a few progress reports for my various projects kicking around on it, but oh well.