Term Two: Week Seven ~ Just Life

Week Seven has come and gone and my photo display this week is mostly on my photography and books we have read. I certainly have missed having my DSLR camera to use and as the weeks progress I hope to spend a bit more time with my photography. 

Rest assured that quality work was done on their written assignments this week, but no photos of that work were taken. It just isn't that exciting anymore. 

Some schedule changes this week as well. We had planned for an excursion to the city to visit a museum we haven't been to in so long that Munchkin has no conscious memory of it. However, when I did some checking online we discovered the museum is currently closed for renovations. We couldn't think of another museum we desperately wanted to visit at this time. We contemplated an outdoor excursion to some of the parks in the city, but then the weather report was for pouring rain on Friday, so we cancelled for now.

The beautiful sunrise that greeted me early Sunday morning. I have lost my ability to rise in the 5am hour but am pretty consistently rising at 6:30am. Just in time to catch the sunrise - which is around the 6:50am mark these days. I am certainly looking forward to 21st June so the days can start getting longer again. I miss waking and rising early enough in the morning to get reading AND computer work done before anyone else is awake.

I'm contemplating a "day in the life" blog post again soon since I haven't done one in YEARS and life with a household of teenagers who are homeschooled looks quite different to what it did when they were in primary school. We shall see what I decide to do as it takes a bit of concentration and advanced planning. 

But for now... this photo represents my early morning time. I try to read (specifically books that aren't suited for my before bed reading time) and while doing that I sip 1-2 cups of tea (or hot chocolate when I'm being really fancy)!!

With winter well and truly upon us Munchkin and I are curious to see what will happen with the tomato plant. These tomatoes are making their best effort to ripen for us. We trimmed the plant back quite a bit and it got a sufficient amount of rain over Thursday and Friday, so we shall see what happens now.

The progress the sunflower made over the course of the week was substantial. The photo on the left was taken on Sunday and the photo on the right was taken on Saturday. That is a LOT of growth in just seven days!! Munchkin is ever so excited that it survived and grew properly. We will need to think about transplanting it to a larger pot in the week to come I think.

This little guy was hanging out near our garage and is a perfect example of why I'm happy to have my DSLR camera working again. I have never attempted macro photography on my phone camera but I'm very comfortable with my DSLR. I have no idea what kind of spider this is, but he is rather beautiful and I'm glad we spotted him.

I found a spot near our fence where I could get up high enough to take some photos of the London Plane Tree in the preschool playground next door.

I have always loved the contrast of the bare trees in winter against a brilliant blue sky.

Hard work during the week earns the boys rewards as the week ends. Munchkin enjoyed some extended reading time and Monkey enjoyed some computer time. Actually both boys get computer time, and both boys enjoy reading - as Monkey has recently found a new series of books he absolutely LOVES - but I decided not to take photos of each of them enjoying BOTH activities.

We did some concentrated reading of junior non-fiction books this week as we have some books on our library shelf that are coming close to reaching their maximum renewal time. This series was slightly below their learning level (I should have read it a year or so ago probably) but still had valuable information for both boys. I've been considering reading these books for awhile now and I'm glad I finally did. 

We continued with this series and will finish it off in the early days of next week. I love it when we find a junior non-fiction author that we love. John Lesley books are always high quality and good value.

These two books were specific for Munchkin. We are doing a long (the full two year stage of registration) unit study on the water cycle and water in the world, so we will always be reading something about water. This book was excellent and we enjoyed all of the information (new and reviewed) that it had to offer.

We also finished off the final book in the Borrowers series. Munchkin loved it so much he immediately started re-reading the series independently.

Fridays look a little bit different for the boys right now as the homeschool family they attend youth group with are travelling at the moment. Until they return, and can provide transport home from youth group, Munchkin will not be attending. Monster continues to travel, via public transport, to and from youth group on his own after work. This means a long day AND a late LATE night on Fridays as he leaves for work at about 7:30am doesn't get home until about 11:30pm.

This week was a combined youth event with another church and included a pizza dinner so Monkey decided he wanted to go. He left our house about 4pm and travelled to the city via bus and train, meeting his brother after work so they could travel the remainder of the trip together. They arrived home just after 11:30pm Friday night and had a wonderful time.

The photo above is one of Monkey, showing me he had met up with his brother (per my request as the weather was shocking), and showing me that his wonderful brother treated him to a raspberry spider to enjoy on the way! Despite POURING rain, they thoroughly enjoyed their night out together.

Only two walks this week - both to the shops - and one in pouring rain. I got caught at the top of our street on the way home (so too close to ring for a ride) and the street is so long I was drenched by the time I got home. It was funny really. Sydney doesn't often have light drizzly rain like Oregon does, and even after 24 years of living here I forget. It is either NOT raining, or POURING. There isn't really much in between here. It is part of that semi sub tropical nature of Sydney weather!!

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).

Not a lot of walking done this week thanks to the stupid weather. But better than nothing.