October school holidays is in full swing and we are enjoying our time off to recharge and refresh. Life is pretty low key, with no events held out of our home because of the continued lock-down, but we didn't let that stop us from having fun. So enjoy the photos below that showcase our second week of relaxation.
We started off the week with a Zoom birthday party for a homeschool friend of ours. He turned 13 and arranged a Kahoot quiz show party with a good group of his friends and family. The boys really enjoyed the opportunity to "see" some of their friends that they haven't met up with in person for over three months now. I am ever so thankful for the variety of different technological advances that allow us to stay in touch during this weird time in history.
I made another trip to the library to "click and collect" most of the books I put on reserve. There is still room on the cards, so I will continue to reserve anything and everything I can possibly think of that will see us successfully through this final term of the school year.
Our library bookshelf is looking good now, but there is still a LOT of room for more books.
With the afternoon Zoom birthday party, and a trip to the library and the chemist (pharmacist) in the late afternoon, dinner was compliments of the "mod cons" I own. The pot on the left steamed up some rice, while my Phillips All-in-One Cooker (similar to the Instant Pot) cooked up a delicious chicken and broccoli meal for us!
Wednesday was our baking day, as I had promised Munchkin that we would bake brownies and also a batch of "Octopus Eyes" which is a cookie I loved when I was growing up and I recently thought to ask my mum for the recipe. Munchkin enjoyed measuring the dry ingredients...
And mixing the batter together...
Then while he enjoyed licking the beaters... I mixed in the flour the rest of the way... as below you can see that it was a decent job for Munchkin to mix it all together!!
The finished batter ready to be rolled into balls and put on the cookie trays...
Monkey joined us for the rolling of the balls of dough... and also for the placing of the Hershey Kisses after the cookies were baked!
A batch of finished cookies and our brownies as well.
Wednesday night is the one night of the week that the boys get a sweet dessert (normally ice cream) and so I take the night as a "cheat night" sometimes as well and indulge in dessert as well. The rest of the week I limit myself to 2 teaspoons or less of added sugar per day.
Thursday afternoon/evening the possibility of severe thunderstorms was predicted. Areas around us did indeed get thunderstorms and hail, but we got three claps of thunder and only a smattering of rain. But the sunset in the evening was glorious!
Friday afternoon I spent some time getting my homemade reading table (my granny trolley with a wooden board placed on top) ready for the start of Term 4 on Monday. We won't do structured written work on Monday during the day because it is a public holiday here (Labour Day) but we will do our normal read aloud sessions in the evening...
This first stack is our Bible and character stack with the boys literature selections on the very top. I will aim to read a story or a chapter from each of these books every day. The only exception is the Bible... we read a minimum of three chapters of the Bible every day.
The second stack of books on my reading table are mainly non-fiction books related to their unit studies for school. Generally speaking Munchkin's selections are on the top, Monkey's are in the middle, and Monster's are on the bottom. This is because our evening routine is such that I read to Munchkin first, then he goes to bed, I read to Monkey second, then he goes to bed, and I finish the evening reading to Monster before he goes to bed.
Friday afternoon I took a quick walk up to the shops to post something at the post office and on my walk home I was greeted with this... and I had to walk directly toward it.
Thankfully I made it home in plenty of time... this was NOT a storm I wanted to be stuck in.
The photos I took don't really do the clouds justice because you can't see the green tinge that formed as it continued to build. We knew this meant hail so we kept a close eye on things and though I left the front door open, I went around the house and quickly closed all the windows so we wouldn't have to rush doing it once the storm hit.
When it hit, we were ready. This photo is horrible quality because it is taken through our lounge room window. Ideally I would have liked to stand on our front verandah and photograph from there, but the front of our house faces the west, there was a strong wind, and the rain was sideways rain that reached all the way to the front door. So we had to close the front door and watch the storm from the lounge room.
We did indeed get hail, but thankfully it was only pea sized so it didn't do any damage. Areas not to far away from us (roughly 20-30 minutes drive away) routinely get golf ball to softball sized hail during some of these wild storms so I'm very thankful that we don't get those. I believe we are in some sort of sheltered area.
Another view of the hail that accumulated on the old recliners that sit on our front verandah.
The hail only lasted for about five minutes and then we just got torrential rain for awhile. Munchkin put his rain boots on and waded in the water for awhile and we just enjoyed listening to the thunder and watching the lightning.
The calm after the storm was another beautiful sunset...
Saturday afternoon this Kookaburra spent some time just sitting on the wire directly outside our house. He didn't seem bothered with me at all so with my super zoom lens I was able to get some nice photographs of him. We have three or four Kookaburras that live in our neighbourhood and we enjoy watching them and listening to them when they make themselves known.
Two read aloud selections that we finished this week...
It is SO wonderful to have library books to read again. I really enjoyed starting Jackie French's Hitler series with Monster, and I also read "The Jungle Book" aloud to Monkey this week. Sadly, the Jungle Book is one of those stories that must be read before you see the movie - at least in our opinion - because Monkey commented that he prefers the Disney version of the movie to the actual written story.
I finished this book during my own independent reading time this week. It was a lovely story.
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