Going Against the Flow: Term One: Week Three ~ We have an Adult!

This week of Term One is always a short week because the focus of our week is on celebrating Monster. This year it was a bigger deal as he turned 18!! and we have our first official adult! I honestly don't know where the time has gone. In the blink of an eye he has gone from a small baby who struggled to nurse and refused to sleep, to this tall, intelligent, polite young man who now eats just fine. We are excited to see what the future has in store for him as he ventures out into the adult world.

The week started with special celebrations at church. Our pastor's wife surprised him with a beautiful and delicious white chocolate cake (his favourite) and our church family sang him happy birthday.

Our traditional photos of Monster with his godparents. This MAY be the last year we make a point of doing this. These two precious people have been such a wonderful influence on Monster's life and we are so thankful for their love and dedication.

An extra bonus - Monster and Auntie L in 2024 (left photo) and Monster and Auntie L in 2006 (right photo) - taken on his first Sunday at church when he was only 7 days old.

After church we stopped at the shopping centre for some groceries and discovered there were celebrations for Chinese Lunar New Year and so we stayed to watch the dragons parade through the centre.

It has been a LONG time since I included a video in my blog post so I hope this works.

Sunday afternoon I decided to walk to the other neighbourhood free little library that is farther away than just up the street from the house. Munchkin came with me and enjoyed balancing on the fence along the park. He also spotted this interesting beetle. Sadly it is missing one wing, but we enjoyed walking it race along the pole.

The walk to the free little library was successful as I found these two books. Munchkin was thrilled that we found the second book in the "Indian in the Cupboard" series, and the other book is on my "library to read" book list so now I don't have to worry about borrowing it some day when I'm ready to read it.

Every year since Monster was born I have taken a photo of him at 12:15am - the ridiculous time of his birth. This is the last year I will force myself to stay up to take the photo as it was a challenge to do it this year. As you can tell from the photo, he is WIDE awake. He may have learnt to eat well since his newborn days, but he still doesn't require much sleep.

The traditional birthday breakfast of bacon and pancakes. I cooked a triple batch of pancakes and fried up 1kg (2.2lbs) of bacon. There were half a dozen pancakes left over but the bacon disappeared.

A quick photo of Monster opening all his lovely birthday cards after breakfast.

He also had a special birthday dinner of "Jordan's Favourite Casserole", fried sweet potato, and steamed cauliflower. He also enjoyed another white chocolate mud cake for dessert but I didn't get any photos of dinner or dessert.

We had a thunderstorm Monday afternoon and the clouds were beautiful.

Other special events on Monster's birthday included playing a card game we hadn't tried yet - "Get Rich Quick 2.0" and the boys enjoyed drinking spiders. Monster's chosen version was creaming soda with vanilla ice cream.

It was a three day school week for us this week. As well as Monster's birthday celebration on Tuesday, I had an appointment Monday afternoon that meant we only got our reading done. Despite the shortened week, we finished three books. Top left photo is a book for Munchkin's science content. Top right book is for Monkey's first history unit study on WWI. We will study World War I all year this year and then World War II all year next year. Finally, the third photo is a "bonus" book for Munchkin. He studied bushrangers last year but our library didn't have this wonderful book. The local library that serves our new neighbourhood DOES have the book so I immediately jumped at the chance to read it aloud to the boys.

A couple of photos of Munchkin working on school work. He preferred the lounge for a lot of his work this week. The second photo shows one of his pages of math that he worked on this week.

Our weekly gardening update...

The tomatoes are thriving (left photo) and I was finally able to photograph the 4 o'clock flower when it was blooming. We are excited that both of these plants are doing so well.

Munchkin was thrilled to discover that his sunflower has sprouted, and he is trying to grow a blueberry plant from a blueberry that he planted (right photo) so stay tuned to see if it worked.

Our coriander is still alive (which is a miracle) and the Spider Plant is doing well also.

Our apple mint is flowering and thus starting to attract flies. Curiously, a wasp sat on the plant for one entire day. We have no idea why and we hope that isn't a common occurrence. Now that we have successfully propagated one apple mint, we will take another cutting from the neighbour's garden and grow another plant. We plan to have a pot of apple mint at the front and back doors to discourage flies from coming in the house.

Sprouts have finally appeared in these little seedling pots that Munchkin wanted to try using. They don't seem to work quite as well as the packaging suggests, but we are happy that the plants are growing.

Finally, his Australian wildflowers are doing well and will be ready for larger pots soon.

As an extra bonus, I thought some of you might be interested to see what sort of record keeping I use. We will have a new AP when we register in 2026 so I want to make sure we show adequate learning. I have typed up curriculum content documents for both boys and as we go through the year I will make note of what books we read, the papers the boys write, and the documentaries we watch. Then at the end of each year I'll type it up nicely in colour and bold so that it stands out nicely. It should then be easy for the AP to skim the documents and see what we've studied and learned.