I spent most of October being out with shingles and a chest infection.  JJ managed to take some time off work during the worst of it but after that he was juggling full time work, homeschooling and generally running the house so don't think he really remembers specifics of any of the homeschooling stuff they did.

Our bees swarmed, and  made this nice ball that dangled off one of the fruit trees for a couple of days.  We got a relative who is a bee keeper to come pick them up.  In the meantime the kids were told to avoid that area, be generally careful while playing outside and I think had some bee-themed lessons from Youtube as both the boys started telling me a lot about bees and hornets shortly afterwards.

Right at the beginning of July we went to Melbourne for 4 days to visit my 97yo grandmother.  While we were there we also went to check out the city and Mum decided that we may as well go and have our first snow experience seeing as we were there in winter, and generously paid for a private tour.

7yo got one of those hatching dinosaur eggs for his birthday.

The fully "grown" thing is now sitting on his shelf with all his other dinosaurs.

I organised to meet up with JJ's family (parents, sister and her family) at Whiteman Park.  We met up at the pretty large and cool playground that had a pretty tall slide tucked into one corner:

We took a fishing trip to Jurien but once again were not able to go out in the boat due to the howling winds.  The boys went fishing off the jetty, JJ caught a blowfish and the same seafull four times.  I caught some godrays and the kids checked out a sundial.  There wasn't enough sun to see what time the sundial thought it was, 11yo tried to take a guess based on the position of the sun while explaining how the sundial worked to 6yo.

Our year started fantastically with being able to go to a performance of The Lion King Broadway Musical courtesy of mother in law who bought us tickets.

We were up in the nosebleed section so couldn't see fine details of costumes or clear facial expressions but got an awesome view of everything going on on the stage and around the theatre (as the performers didn't restrict themselves to the stage).

One of JJ's friends recently hosted a science themed birthday party for his 7yo, complete with science experiments.

First up was lemon batteries.  They had fun poking various pieces of metal into the lemons and then tried to light a small LED from it.

Unfortunately the lemons didn' put out enough power to light the LEDs on thi occasion (it had apparently worked when JJ's friend was testing out suitable experiments for the party).  They moved on to the next thing while JJ used a metal coat hanger to skewer some of the lemons into a parallel to see what kind of charge he could get and apparently we'd need quite a lot of lemons to get one small LED to turn on.

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

Perth Zoo

9yo displayed that he does have some organisational skills while we were playing Minecraft and he wandered off and said he had found some mines, then told me the coordinates so I could join him.  He had made a book and quill to use as a journal (and would be less likely to misplace seeing as it's in-game) in which he was writing down the coordinates of our bases and any mines he encountered (which would then be deleted once we'd finished exploring and digging them out).

7yo wrote me a poem:

We binged out on history recently.  I can't remember if I mentioned instating a docos-only-before-bookwork rule to stop the kids from gluing themselves to screens and routinely refusing to come do the bookwork, but it's been working reasonably well.  Horrible Histories was the recent favourite, I think they've watched every dvd we have now as well as anything on iView at the time, and favourite dvds have been repeated with them singing along.  As well as watching Horrible Histories, 9yo has also decided to have me read him the books for bedtime story.  We're also still very slowly working our way through the very thick Ned Kelly book.

Week has been flat tack.

But today they made potions.  Supervised from a distance as today is a work day.  Ingredients included a small tub of yoghurt, jellybeans, cordial (even though I told them no food items they could consume directly when they asked if they could make potions ie before they'd had a chance to gather ingredients, they tried to claim they had somehow assembled these things before I'd told them no food items), citric acid, bicarb, vinegar, hippie lice shampoo (contains only eucalyptus and melaleuca oils) and hippie plant-based detergent.

Tao made a big potion in a "cauldron" (big tin bucket with two handles, it's supposed to be a drink holder) which smelled nice and bubbled lots when you stir it.  We had a brief chat about what makes the bubbles when he dragged me out to see.

Ru assisted and then went to have a picnic on the cubby house.