Going Against the Flow: Term Two: Week Six ~ A Social Week

What a week this turned out to be.

Unexpectedly, hubby was gifted fabulous tickets to the women's soccer match Monday night AND the State of Origin rugby league match Wednesday as well. I adjusted my plans accordingly and realised that school wasn't going to look quite like how I had planned. But that is totally okay because gifts like this don't happen every week.

In other news, the rain returned, and although the boys stayed dry at both games, Thursday and Friday it poured and staying home was a blessing. We spent a good portion of Thursday opening the front door repeatedly to check for flooding, but thankfully it was only relatively minor street flooding.

Written work was somewhat hit and miss this week with the late nights after the games, so I turned my focus to our reading and we finished off some GREAT books.

For starters, I highly recommend this book. It was a wonderful way to learn fun background information about a variety of children's stories. Everything from "Where the Wild Things Are" and "The Giving Tree" to "Percy Jackson", the "Harry Potter series", "Diary of a Wimpy Kid" and "Captain Underpants"! We laughed a lot and were surprised by some of the things we learned. If you can get a copy of this book, check it out.

This turned our to be an excellent series for both the boys. I love when I stumble across a well written series that covers lots of information and is enjoyable to read. This series definitely ticked all those boxes for me. High quality junior non-fiction books are still a must in our homeschool even with two high school students now. Many junior non-fiction books are still FULL of quality information and very often gives us a beginning point (introduction) before diving in more deeply with adult non-fiction.

This was another new series of books that I stumbled on and it was well worth our time spent reading them. So much fun to learn about the many different kinds of structures all over the world. It was fun to quiz Monkey as to how many of the modern structures he already knew about through his independent learning of buildings that he does. The information was well written and presented and the photographs were amazing.

This is another wonderful junior non-fiction series our library has and there are MANY more books in the series than just these few we read this week. In the past I've read a few of the titles aloud to Monster and Monkey, but since then more titles have been added, and it is time for Munchkin to enjoy the series so we are re-reading it. A myriad of science topics are covered by these books and they are fun to read as well.

Late Monday afternoon I received this photo in a text message from Monster. This is a building in the city near where he works. I couldn't quite figure out why he sent it to me, until he pointed out the two men perched at the top of the building on the left, washing the windows. He knows my extreme fear of heights so I'm sure got a giggle out of my verbal (text) reaction when I fully realized the reason behind the photo. I included it in this blog post because I love photos of buildings in cities.

Hubby graciously took a selfie of himself, Munchkin, and Monster while they attended the women's Australia versus China soccer match. I believe this was a qualifying match for the Olympics and our ladies won.

Monster took some excellent photos during the game and was kind enough to share them with me. Monkey and I opted to stay home Monday night.

Now for the weekly gardening update!

After some advice from our lovely neighbour, Munchkin and I took some time trimming back all the dead and dying parts of the tomato plant and added some more soil to the pot. It started to look much better almost immediately. The rain through the week helped as well. There are six small tomatoes on the plant that we are desperate to have ripen, and also two more flowers. Despite the winter weather, we are hopeful that we will get to taste at least one harvest.

Some macro photos of the slow ripening of the tomatoes.

This pot is a mystery. Munchkin and I have no idea what this is that is growing. It could be a plant, or a weed. So we're waiting and watching.

The aloe vera plant is doing so well it has a flower!!

These two plants have had a miraculous revival.

On the left is our apple mint plant that we originally grew from a cutting that a kind friend further up the street gifted Munchkin with. Initially it grew quite well but then suddenly died - you might just be able to see the brown stick on the far right of the photo which is the original plant. We left it in the pot and suddenly realised it was growing again.

On the right is Munchkin's sunflower that he planted many weeks ago. It also, initially grew and then (we think) some creature ate all the leaves off the stem. But as we could see a bit of green on the stem we left it, and here we are now with this beautiful plant growing and a flower beginning to develop. Stay tuned for further updates.

The late nights affected me this week as well and I failed to get up within the 5am hour several days this week. Instead I woke somewhere between 6:30am and 7am and had some beautiful last bits of the sunrise to appreciate out the kitchen window.

We did get some work done that counts towards structured or written schoolwork.

Left Photo: Monkey working on a math exercise

Right photo: Munchkin hard at work on a Lego stop motion video he is creating.

Neither boy is enthusiastic about having photos taken for the blog. They only agree if their faces are NOT in the photo, so I apologize to my readers as you won't see their faces much anymore apparently. It is a teenage thing.

During a walk to the shopping centre for groceries, Munchkin and I noticed this AMAZING cloud formation. I've never seen anything like it ever before.

Two photos of the boys at game 1 of the State of Origin rugby league series. The top photo was graciously taken by some other fans seated near them, and this bottom photo was the selfie hubby took.

A quick explanation for my US readers.

State of Origin is a three game rugby league series played between NSW and QLD. For my Oregon readers, this is a professional version of the Civil War football games between OSU and UofO!!

It is a fierce rivalry and the only rugby I bother to watch each year now.

A couple of shots of the game hubby took for me.

The weather report was for rain all night (which didn't actually arrive until well AFTER the game) so I opted to stay home and watch the game on our big screen TV. In the end, I'm glad I made this decision (Monster stayed home as well) because it was quite possibly the worst game I've ever seen. NSW had a man sent off within the first 8 minutes of the game and we played the rest of the match one man down. As I expected, we lost in spectacular fashion. To top it off, someone decided to radically change the national anthem (NOT an improvement) and the whole thing just left a very bad taste in my mouth.

There are two more games to go (one at the end of June and one mid July) and I suspect we'll lose both of those games as well. I'll still watch them. Maybe some day our boys will figure out what it takes to beat QLD but I'm not expecting it to be this year.

That brings us to Friday and our fortnightly trip back to Riverwood for library books.

No photos of Thursday - as I mentioned above - it poured all day.

This is a quick shot of one of the trees in Riverwood with the beautiful colour changes.

Our library bookshelf is extremely full! I returned 38 books and picked up 43!! We have some excellent reading ahead of us over the next two weeks. I restrained myself and only picked up three adult non-fiction books to read!

Munchkin is currently working on a creation for a game he plays online called Loomian Legacy. It is a contest to see who can redesign a character in a "summer" theme. I will keep you posted as he finishes and submits his creation. I am impressed with the work he is putting into this. If he wins, the creation is included in the game AND he will receive 10,000 Robucks (in game money).