I had bought The Art of War in very recent history (can't remember precisely when but I feel like it's been at least a year by now) as 14yo had expressed a desire to read it. He didn't get around to actually reading it until recently, when he suddenly went on a health kick (both physical and mental) and on advice of J and 18yo, started trying to get in at least a little bit of exercise, eat a healthy breakfast (the kids and I don't really eat breakfast as we never feel particualrly hungry for a while after waking up) and read a book every day.

We accidentally had two excursions this month. I'm not sure whether that makes us "caught up" due to not having one last month or able to chill next month given that the first and second months tend to be organisational and transitional.

The last time we went to the Gravity Discovery Centre was in 2010. Unfortunately stuff just didn't occur to J and I, for whatever reason I thought that we were only going for the night thing even though their night things always include entry into the rest of it, so I didn't cancel roleplaying, and J assumed we'd be roleplaying and didn't mention it. And it was unfortunate as the kids would have made the entire solar system walk now, before we only managed to get up to Uranus before we had to turn back.

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.  

As is normal for us, November kind of slowly ground to a halt as there was a rather large thing to take care of and then we focused hard on/got roped into helping with end of year stuff, and December was pretty much a write-off.

15yo worked through a Netflix documentary series about F1 racing as her boyfriend is really into it so she was trying to learn a little more about it.  I watched a couple of episodes with her and she told me a bit about the boyfriend's favourite team and favourite driver and a few of the other drivers, saying that now she at least knew who he was talking about when he was excitedly babbling about them like they were friends she should know.  We also marvelled at the pit crews basically disassembling and reassembling a car in seconds.

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.

I don't know what happened to October either, aside from the roleplaying games continued (I have this vague idea that I will write about how roleplaying games are good for maths, drama and general language development one day).  I think we may have also started more hardcore development of my dice system.  12yo has been making suggestions and helping test mechanics.  October may have also been the month where I found out that 16yo was doing more algebra, because apparently he thinks he needs algebra for the TAFE course he's thinking of enrolling in.  Not sure how much he's done as I think he's gotten himself a new Khan Academy account instead of resetting the password for his existing one so I'll have to try to remember to check that up when I'm compiling the report for the moderator meeting.

When the kids expressed interest in playing Vampire, I told them that I hated the subsystem.  Mechanically it's not any different from Changeling, it's the lore that I don't like (there's nothing wrong with it per se, just not my style), and while you can be combat heavy with it (which given the insane strength and speed vampires have can be quite entertaining and occasionally interesting to manage), it's generally geared towards more political intrigue which I am absolutely terrible at because I'm lucky if I have Wits 1.

Mild content warning: occasional swearing and mild adult themes

We had a slight derailment right at the outset as S was unable to make the session.  I only do character driven stories so players not being able to make sessions can make things fall apart, so normally we would just skip (I had previously tried to encourage the kids to make Redcaps that we could use in a casual drop-in/out filler game as a Redcap gang lends itself well to that, plus they could get any murderhobo/random dickishness/silly out, but the older boys had decided "Changeling is cringe").  However in this case seeing as it was early on, I managed to restructure stuff in my head (and later on in my notes) enough to postpone S to the next session.

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 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.