This first week of Term Two was an interesting one.
I knew it was going to be different because our eldest started work (more about that later in the blog) but a couple of other things happened during the week that meant it was not what I had originally planned or expected. But my boys are used to going with the flow now so we made the best of the situation and it turned out to be a pretty good week.
To start off this blog post I have some beautiful photos of the flowers in our church garden. I'm so thankful that hubby found the battery charger for my DSLR camera and now I can get back to my photography a bit. I really missed not being able to take photos with my Canon. I don't mind the camera on my phone, but it just isn't the same, and quite honestly, I don't think the quality of photos comes close to my Canon.
I discovered that a beautiful Kangaroo Paw has been recently planted in the church garden. I love Kangaroo Paw plants and particularly the deep red ones so I'll be having lots of fun photographing this in the weeks and months to come.
These are two other of my favourites. Little did I know, when I snapped the photo on the right, that we wouldn't be seeing blue sky for a LONG LONG while!
This is quite possibly the last time Monster will feature in the blog posts. For a bit of a recap... He graduated from our homeschool in December and started a Certificate IV TAFE course in Financial Services at the beginning of the new year. (For my American readers this is similar to community college courses and it will give him entry to college/university in the future if need be.) The course is 100% online and also independent study which is perfect because he wanted to get a job. Thanks to our pastor who let him know about a position in the city, our eldest is now working full-time. He is a junior office assistant (for lack of a better term) and is mainly in charge of their printing and binding jobs that need to be sent off to various places around the city, state, and country. He had an excellent first week and he LOVES the job. He allowed me to take this photo of him just before he left the house Monday morning.
After I saw Monster off for his first day of work on Monday I noticed our tomato plant has a TON of new flowers all over it so I took a few minutes to photograph them. Hopefully it will stay warm enough for a few more weeks so we can get at least one harvest of tomatoes this year.
This was my weather app early Monday morning! Often times the long term weather report isn't very accurate, but sadly, in this case... it was VERY accurate!
Thankfully, due to the council doing a PROPER job with the street sweeper machine (as in two men walked in front of the machine with leaf blowers getting all the leaves and debris out from under all the parked cars so the machine could actually clean the street) the flooding this week has been minimal. A bit of water on the footpath/sidewalk, and up into our driveway, but no threat of water coming into the house.
We did a LOT of extra reading this week - and you will see why a little further down in the blog post. These two photos show the boys curled up on the lounge while I worked through many junior non-fiction books. In my humble opinion, when the weather is wet and dreary, reading is a GREAT activity.
We finished reading the Bible this week and got started on it again.
Wednesday morning was our wild day for the week. At 10:52am my husband noticed a text message from the electric company stating that due to some emergency pole repairs that needed doing, the power would be turned off at 11am and could be off for as long as 8 hours. I quickly pulled food for lunch out of the fridge and placed it in an insulated bag with ice packs, and also changed our school plans for the day. With varying levels of light due to on and off again rain, I decided that the boys would each do a short math exercise and then we would focus on reading.
In the photo on the right you can see that the old pole is leaning heavily to the right as it has broken. When the power was out all day on a Sunday a couple of months ago, they worked to lash the old pole to the new pole with lots of cables. But the heavy rain meant they had to get the wires transferred from the old pole to the new pole as soon as possible. That is what they worked on all day on Wednesday, and thankfully our power was restored just before 6pm.
Some close up shots of the crack in the old pole. A neighbour advises that when they remove the old pole they will have to turn off the power again because there are still some lines attached, but we shall see what happens in the next week or two.
A beautiful rainy sunrise Wednesday morning!
Monster agreed to a second photo this week once he had his official work shirts. They also gifted him an umbrella (which he was happy to have), a cloth tote bag which he gifted to me, and a stainless steel water bottle.
I have to make an effort to record evidence of the boys structured written work. This is not particularly necessary, but we will have a new AP when we register in January 2026, so I want to make sure she has the evidence she needs to easily give us another two years registration. Our usual AP is retiring and assured us we have nothing to worry about, but as the new person won't know us at all, it will be somewhat like starting from the beginning.
Another change of routine this week - and evidence that I need to be more organised as far as Monkey's math is concerned. I am WAY to used to Monster being around when we get stuck on something. Mid-week we struggled because I couldn't figure out how to get our calculators on our phones to do the equations we needed to do in our assignment. I resorted to Khan Academy which meant that Monkey and I had to work through the problems separately while sitting at my computer in the office (as you can see Monkey doing in the photo on the left). I spoke to Monster last night and he quickly and easily showed me ONE button on the calculator on our phones that would have solved the problem!! So now I know to look through our math for the week on Saturday or Sunday afternoon in case I need any help or further explanation from Monster!!
SIDE NOTE: This is an example of one of the MANY reasons why I LOVE homeschooling...
This chapter of math that Monkey is working through is trigonometry - something I NEVER took in high school because only algebra I and geometry were required for graduation and for my major in university. So this was my first attempt at trigonometry and I was pleased that I understood the concepts and did well on the assignments AND taught the information to Monkey in such a way that he understood the concepts and had success with the assignments. We didn't actually need Monster's help understanding the math, but figuring out our stupid phone calculators!!
The right hand photo is a picture of Munchkin working on one of his math exercises for the week. His chapter is fractions - definitely not his favourite topic, but he did well and worked hard.
We did a LOT of reading this week. Along with all these wonderful junior non-fiction titles, we also enjoyed our literature selections (I started a new book with each boy) and worked on our adult non-fiction titles that we started last term. However, those books will take awhile to finish and will therefore feature in later blog posts.
Above are three wonderful books I read aloud to Munchkin as part of his Ancient Egypt unit study. They top two are both excellently written and have beautiful illustrations to go with them.
The bottom book is a fun one to read as it pokes fun at some of the stranger aspects of Ancient Egyptian life. It is always an amusing series to read.
This is an excellent series that covers numerous science and geography topics within the curriculum for both boys. We have a couple more to read in the coming week and we have enjoyed learning lots of information about the various habitats within Australia.
Two junior non-fiction books for Monkey - left is for his WWI unit study and the right covers some science topics for his curriculum as well.
This was a fun series I stumbled across "accidentally" while researching other books for Munchkin - this happens ALL the time - and I love that homeschooling gives us the freedom to explore "rabbit trails" when we come across them.
It was fun to learn a bit more about how different Australia was in the past.
As heavy rain is predicted for Sunday, I decided that I wanted to spend Sunday afternoon reading, therefore I worked hard on Saturday getting all my weekend "chores" done. I took a trip to the grocery store so we wouldn't have to go after church, I did all the cooking I needed to for dinners for the weekend, AND I got school planning done as well.
Finally, our neighbours two doors down purchased and planted a pink crepe myrtle tree. As Munchkin is thrilled with all things plants and gardening, he and I stood outside and chatted with the neighbours as they planted the tree. It is a bit sad looking so I deemed it a "Charlie Brown" sort of tree and hopefully now that it is planted it will thrive.
As they worked to get it in the ground a small branch broke off so I kept it and set it up in Munchkin's propagation station to see if it will grow some roots. If it does I will plant it in a pot and see what happens.
Three days of walking to the shops for groceries (in between the rainstorms) meant three big walks for me this week. Munchkin accompanied me on two of these trips.
Finally this is the long term forecast on my weather app as of early Saturday morning. Another week of rain to look forward to. It seems Sydney is channelling Oregon valley weather at the moment and I am not particularly impressed.
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