Yay we got the Camera back!

Silly camera... flash-bulb blew and it took about 3 weeks to get it fixed. Oh well, now all our memories don't need to look like we are all sitting in a dark room.

Today we visited with friends who live on a lifestyle block. They had a few chickens who had not been laying and they were bullying the younger chickens and wanted to get rid of them so Tane volunteered to get rid of them. Well... the kids were ever so fascinated and wanted to watch them have their necks broken, but it was too gruesome for me.

Here are a few pics of the kids since we can now take pics again yay!. Ella is slowly getting better at playing with Lily. Probably 70 percent of the time with supervision she is manageable. It's just if she discovers Lily unprotected, then she's in trouble.

We have been learning about the stars and moon lately. So as a fun project the kids made the phases of the moon out of oreos. So the kids had to separate oreos and then make the phases of the moon using the remaining sides. I think I distributed far too many oreos each and Joshua spent the first 10 minutes eating all the extra sides.

I think Ella Had more fun eating them...

Joshua explains his phases of the moon.

Joseph talks about his moon phases.

Random Pics

Ella-Rose having her own kind of fun!

She has all of a sudden developed a love of books... I think it relates to the fact that we have stories together each day for at least an hour and longer if the kids can convince me otherwise. So she always wants to be the first in line to have stories read to her. She also runs round the house finding the narnia books and running up to me chanting 'narnia, narnia'. She knows it is something cool, even if she doesn't understand. She even jumped on Joshua's knee today with Dr Seuss and requested 'read me', which he did as I was pre-occupied with Lily.

At the moment we are reading 'Cheaper by the Dozen' as well as 'The Silver Chair'. The kids are splitting their sides... it is extremely funny, and also interesting as we are learning lot about another time and another place (USA early 1900s).

Ella-Rose loves swings and the park. She is also even getting a little better each week at going to nursery. So far she lasted 30 mins without needing to be brought to me. Slowly we are getting there and she is realising nursery is much more fun than mummy's class.

Lily loves kisses, she laughs a lot. I laugh too. She is gorgeous. She is such a great baby. I think she's going to be a thumb sucker. She just sucks her fingers and is off to sleep pretty quick, she barely cries - yay. She loves food... she took to food more readily than any of the other children.

Blackberries and cows in the backyard... almost

It is really quite cool having a farm almost next door. The kids have discovered much to their delight, that the field is full of wild blackberry bushes. They want to go on an almost daily visit to pick the newly blackened blackberries. We could hear the cows mooing from the backyard so I took the kids over to see them, and they were not as close as I thought... a few paddocks over, but the kids still had fun looking at them through their binoculars. I love it because it reminds me of the trips to the woods we would take when I was younger growing up in Barnsley... and the blackberry picking and blackberry pies and blackberry jam my mum would make from the collection.

 The view from our front garden

 The girls looking at the cows

 Anna-Maria posing for the camera

 Ella-Rose following suit

 Little Lily trying to see whats going on too

 Four kids having fun

Picking and tasting blackberries... yum!

As for Narnia, we are 3 chapters away from finishing 'Voyage of the Dawn Treader'. I can't believe I didn't read these when I was a kid. There are some really great values in there - in addition to the awesome adventures of course.

The shopping trip - what a disaster. I had wanted to get a freezer before Tane went away so I could fill it up and not have to take all the kids shopping for a big shop... or even not at all. However we were pretty busy and that ended up not happening. So today we were running pretty short on supplies... we were down to our last carrot after morning tea... you know you're low when the kids have to have carrots for tutti fruiti time.
At first Joshua and Joseph decide to have some kind of crazy wrestling match in the supermarket. Talk about  embarrassing. However I managed to distract them by sending them on search and find missions to various regions of the supermarket looking for items on our list. Phew survived after an hour and a half... with poor Lily intact, but it is impossible to have her and Ella-Rose in the same shopping trolley. Ella just wants to bite, scratch and basically terrorise her sister.

In the evening after dinner, we had our family home evening and planted our winter garden. Joseph chose brussel sprouts (or little soccer balls - as he calls them), Anna-Maria chose cauliflower - her favourite thing for dinner, Josh chose broccoli and I got pak choy, spinach and leeks. Unfortunately as the older kids were transplanting their seedlings, Ella-Rose decided to pull all the leek seedling out... so only a very small fraction of them were planted in the garden. Also mental note to myself... to make this garden work we need to get a soak hose tomorrow - the gardern is so dry, even despite multiple trips to the tap with buckets, it remains as dry as ever.

Ella-Rose: Has been practising counting. We have a funny game she likes to play on the trampoline. She jumps and we count to 10 and then splat - she splats onto the trampoline, has a giggle and then gets back onto her feet to start again. She is learning her colours by gardening. She is learning not to pick the green tomatoes but to wait until they are orange. We have some strange orange tomato variety. They are simply delicious and taste almost a cross between a tomato and an apricot if that is even possible.

Joshua: Is reading 'Call of the Wild'. Although he only needed to read 1 chapter today... he of course became immersed and didn't come up for air until I suggested we go outside to look at the cows. He really likes animals, so is also reading a book all about horses, the different breeds, purposes and how to look after a horse.... He also likes to look at the horses available on Trademe... and is dropping hints to me such as 'we need a paddock to put a horse in'.

Joseph: Is enjoying practising the piano and committing his pieces to memory. He played 'Set' with Anna-Maria. It is a really great game for pattern spotting, he was teaching Anna-Maria how to identify a set. She was initially frustrated, but in the end she managed to put a few good sets together. His homeschool goals consisted of 'lots of PE every day'. So today that consisted of lots and lots of bouncing on the trampoline.

Anna-Maria: Is the most motivated child. She wrote in her journal, practised her spelling words and played 'Set". She also had a really unfortunate accident today :(  She was bouncing on the trampoline and moved back too far. As she came down she landed with each leg astride the bar and then fell onto the floor. Poor thing. She was beside herself, but after spending an hour in bed - doing paired reading with Joseph (Hansel and Gretel, & Bubbles) she was back to her normal self. She was happy because we put her new curtains up in her room. And I was happy to because they are much thicker and make the room much darker and hence it hopefully will be easier to convince the girls it really is bedtime even though the sun is still shining outside.

Lily: Had her first taste of solids today. She seemed to really enjoy it after the first 2 tsps of wondering what on earth is this new stuff. She had pear and banana with baby rice. She is also really enjoying trying to grab hanging toys and she is smiling and chuckling a lot.

Beach fun!

Yesterday was a stunner of a day... and being a public holiday we went to the beach. We went to Raglan for a Stake activity. Anna-Maria was so surprised to see black sand "I have never seen back sand before!"

And she was full of questions about how it became black.

Ella-Rose was initially cold in the water so spent some of the afternoon snuggled up in my jacket.

Later on in the afternoon we couldn't pull her out of the water, she loved it.

The boys and Tane waited for high tide so they could jump off the bridge. Josh and Tane jumped a few times but Joseph thought he would wait till next time - (because by then he would be taller and the drop would therefore be less - according to him). But he still enjoyed hanging on the edge of the bridge with his Dad as and still felt pretty brave about that.

Joshua also had fun creating a sand dam on the beach to prevent water from high-tide returning back to the estuary.

I know it looks like they are playing in mud, but it is black sand honest!

I tried to keep little Lily in the shade as much as possible, but that didn't stop her from smiling a lot. But it is so difficult to catch her smiles on camera. She smiles, I point the camera, she thinks I've gone and stops smiling... and this just repeats itself over and over till I have about a hundred half smiling photos. So here are the best ones.

She is such a little cutie... and seems so much older than she was when she was born nearly 4 months ago.

After exhausting ourselves silly and working up a big appetite... we got wind of a rumour that there was a tsunami warning due to an earthquake in the Solomon Islands. Well, we had been at the beach for about 6 hours and our rumbling tummies were craving some junk food, so it was time to depart. But of course we had to take a detour to Manu Bay so Tane could goggle at the surf. After a while I asked him whether he wanted to come home with is or hitch a ride home... I think he got the message, as he was getting hungry too.

I think you could say, a good time was had by all.

Rockets, Trigonometry and Monkey Ella

Firstly a photo of Lily-Grace. What a little cutie. Holding herself up for tummy time and rolling over.

One of the many reasons why I love homeschool. Last night Joshua was reading on the New Zealand Rocketry Association website (NZRA). He was reading an account by a group of boys who were very successful at making and launching their model rockets. He is very interested in rockets and explosives and prior to me finding this site for him, he had found a recipe for solid rocket fuel. A comment captured his attention... the boys who were good at trigonometry were good at calculating the heights of their launched rockets.

This led him to comment to me. Remind me in the morning to do my mathsbuddy. This was exciting for me as he himself was becoming motivated to study in the area which a year ago was his weakest area of interest... and not because he couldn't do it, but because of the repetitive simple maths he was required to do over and over again.

So this morning (and on a Saturday too) I reminded him to do his mathsbuddy. I suggested he do his year 5 angles and progress from there through all the year levels till he reach trigonometry  Well he had other ideas. He picked the year 10 trigonometry lesson. After watching it for a few seconds he pressed pause. I was thinking ok... he wants to go back and do the more basic lessons, but he surprised me and said

"you'd better get me a pencil and paper so I can write all this stuff down." 

So there he was scribbling down pictures of right angled triangles and labelling with new words such as theta, hypotenuse, opposite and adjacent. Then he was introduced to the equations of SOHCAHTOA. Once again he eagerly wrote those down and then proceeded to complete the worksheet. He really enjoyed it and asked me why he hadn't learnt this at school, and then was very interested in real life examples of this. So his dad took him outside and they used trigonometry to find the height of a tree in the back-yard.

It was so cool to
a. be a part of the learning process
b. teach him something he has a real interest in

And after that he went up the hill to our friends house, who happens to be an engineer, to help them split wood, play in the water and eat pizza. So I was left wondering how much of that he had taken in... but when he came back he had more questions about what he had learnt... and he didn't do too badly either getting 83 percent for his first attempt.

A few funny comments by the kids...

Ella came walking in with a mouth full of something. I asked her "What's in your mouth?"
She opens her mouth wide and points inside and states matter-of-factly, "Grandma!".
I look surprised and ask her "Is grandma in your mouth?"
Ella answers "Yes!".

Ella climbs on the top bunk, laughs and chants "Monkey Ella, Monkey Ella", referring to herself.

My little monkey Ella

Ella loves movie night and goes round saying "Moome"