Our second week of school holidays was just as wet as the first so we hunkered down for more time indoors. Monster bought himself a Nintendo Switch recently and has been kind and generous enough to spend time playing Mario Kart with his two brothers. We've allowed a bit of extra screen time to accommodate this generosity.
Munchkin attended one last School Holidays event at the library. A turtle weaving craft that he absolutely loved, which made it well worth the effort to get there.
Hubby surprised me this week with some lovely new slippers (ugg boots) for my feet. My previous pair had done well - lasting just over two years - but finally lost their battle and split all around the seams on one foot. I have happy (and quite warm) feet once again.
The second week of the school holidays always means a MASSIVE number of books put on reserve and collected for the new term. One thing I learnt from Australia's long, seventeen week, Delta lockdown of last year, was to NOT take the library (and its ability to be open) for granted. I no longer reserve books "as we need them" which is how I functioned before COVID, and instead reserve EVERYTHING we need for the entire term at the very beginning. Because a term is ten weeks long, AND we get two renewals on each book, I can keep books for a total of nine weeks, providing no one puts them on reserve. However, the librarian and I cooked up a little trick that means I can keep books just a little bit longer without the nuisance of having to return and re-borrow anything. There are no fines for overdue library books anymore, the only consequence is that any books that go more than ten days overdue cause that card to be locked until the book is returned. So I now allow all our books to go one week overdue before renewing them, which effectively gives me twelve weeks total borrowing time.
As our youngest child is now ten years old, the pram is only used for transporting library books and groceries. It easily holds all the books from a "beginning of term" borrowing session and can also hold about a week's worth of groceries if I am creative in my stacking of bags.
Two different views of our library shelf show that it is well stocked and we are ready for a term of great learning.
I ended the week with some necessary and required planning time - I now try to write out all ten weeks of calendar pages for the two younger boys as it gives me a good overview of the term.
Two separate trips to the grocery store AND a trip to the library on Friday meant I got double my (current) daily target of walking in.
Munchkin is taking full advantage of his free "fluffy" reading time as I've warned him that I'll be changing the type and level of books that he has access to during the new term.
These were some new finds at the library and Munchkin was pleased with all of them.
Some school holidays I take a complete break from all reading aloud and other school holidays I only do our "core" non-negotiable daily reading. This particular school holidays I continued our literature reading and also some history reading for both Munchkin and Monster. We are now ready to begin reading the Ruby stories (as soon as one of the libraries in our system "finds" the books) and Monster and I thoroughly enjoyed this book about the French Revolution. It was well worth the time and effort we put into it and I'm glad we continued reading it over the holidays. It was technical (though thoroughly well written and enjoyable) and therefore would have been hard to pick up again after a two week break.
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