After a bit of reading together in the morning the kids got busy...

While I was still wandering around in my pjs and eating breakfast, they were outside drawing with the chalks... (these are Danielle's ones, I wasn't able to snap Nathan's)

Then onto making paper boats...

 I found a little figurine made of plasticine that Danielle had been working on - a chicken riding on a wagon...

 Then down to our pond to float the boats (needs a bit more water lol)...

 I was making a calendula oil and the kids wanted to make their own as well - so we found some rose petals and lavender for them to infuse.

 They saw me rearranging my herbal supplies and decided to set aside space in each of their rooms for displaying all their special little bits and pieces along with their oil bottles.

 (Nathan's)

(Danielle's)

In the afternoon we headed off to play with friends, then after dinner off for a play at the park with dad.

A picture of Nathan "posing" with a piece of grass in his mouth "like in the old days mum!"

 And our chickens dust bathing in the kids sandpit...

Sunday was a fairly busy day! We were out of the house before 11am to drop Nathan and Simon off to a Kea's Birthday celebration - they had 4hrs of activities, games and fun. I dropped Danielle off to a birthday party and had a few hours to myself...

Late afternoon we headed to friends for a bonfire for a Beltane celebration and cooked our sausages and baked veges over the small bonfire. And finished off with toasted marshmallows of course!

 Monday we had a much needed day at home to catch up on outside chores. Simon worked on creating mulch which the kids helped with, and then helped me spread over the garden paths. Nathan headed off to Keas in the afternoon where they were meeting at a local confidence course and had a great time.

 Today we decided to have a "home day" to just hang out, relax and rebalance. I started off reading another of our Magic Treehouse books. This one was set in Shakespeare times. The kids then showed me a restaurant they'd set up. It cost a penny to get in (placed in the "box" which we found out was the where the original term "box office" came from) and on the floor are the "groundlings" and up on the desk are those sitting in the gallery.

 We then headed outside into the beautiful sunny day and gathered various flowers and greenery for a while.

 We spotted a monarch visiting our swan plants and she laid some eggs. Yippee! This was kind of exciting, as we'd missed this part of the cycle back in late summer when we discovered all our caterpillars.

 Nathan's catapault that he spent a bit of time figuring out how to make it work, how to create a "scoop"
 to hold the thing he wanted to catapault (originally tried to tie the black seed tray on and ended up used a soccer shin pad which has velcro straps) and...success!

 (all the straw over the grass was from last week's "nest making" attempts.

 He then was inspired to test the theory of things falling at the same rate no matter the size or weight (and challenged that theory by dropping an ice block wrapper and a balloon).

The kids were trying out the timer function on the camera...

After dinner Simon took them down for a walk to the dairy to buy some cream to have on our rhubarb crumble (first of the season).

Oh, I've been absent!

Eeek, it's been about 6-7wks since I last blogged here.

Life has just been ticking along for the most part.

Nathan was interested in looking at another of the badges he can earn for his Keas. So we looked at the Healthy Kea one and he was required to make a poster with healthy foods.

The kids wanted to learn a bit Australia before we headed off for our holiday. So I traced out a map for them to colour in and mark up where we'd be going.

We did a bit of Spring crafting back at the equinox.

We did have a wonderful holiday on the Sunshine Coast in Australia for a week. That was the kids first overseas trip, and they did fantastically (even though Danielle didn't actually get given a seat next to a parent (WTH!?) and I had her sitting on my lap for the entire flight after a bit of musical chairs with fellow passengers so she could at least sit next to Simon for the take off and landing as no one would give up their seat for a permanent swap).

Anyway, so after a family wedding the next day, the holiday really felt like it began for the kids. My brother and family stayed in the apartment above us so the cousins got to hang out as they wanted which was really neat for them. We had a little backyard with our apartment so they all got to play hide and seek, climb trees and fences etc too rather than being cooped up in a hotel room.

The highlight for the kids was visiting Australia Zoo. We got to see Bindi singing and dancing in one of the shows, and Danielle and her cousin had a ball up with all the kids singing and dancing along.

We did plenty of swimming and boogy boarding at the beach, jumping around rock pools and bush walks (phew! weather was in the mid-20s and just gorgeous)


So in the weeks since we've been back the kids have joined up with a gymnastics class, Nathan's started swimming lessons, we've had library visits and making our way through the entire Magic Tree House series again since I last read them to Nathan when he was 4 and 5 and Danielle's now really getting into them.

We've caught up with the friends, had family visit, and general hanging out in the garden collecting flowers, planting out our spring garden, watching the chickens scratch and dust-bath, learning to ride bigger bikes (Danielle's upsized and is becoming quite confident now), chopping up branches for firewood, making big nests from straw piles...

Nathan got interested in tying knots again.

 Danielle making her chicken a cake.

 An awesome big rope swing.

 A tea-party with a friend.

 I bought them some plasticine yesterday and they've spent ever since playing with it.

 

Ugh! We've been homebound for about a week as the kids take turns having a cold. But it's been all ok really. We've had a few lovely warm days and a few horribly wet days. Good to balance the mix of inside/outside stuff.

Outside they've been...

~ Pole vaulting (well, Danielle showed me what she'd "discovered" by jumping high using a long stick and I told her about pole vaulting and we looked up some Youtubes of it in action)
~ Sandpit play - digging down so deep they disappear into the ground with just their head poking out (yikes, the thought of an earthquake occuring while doing that doesn't sound like fun)
~ Climbing the pear tree

Inside...

~ Nathan's been playing on the Reader Rabbit Maths CDRom
~ Danielle's been playing the World Explorer game on the computer
~ Danielle's been measuring all her soft toys to see who's the longest
~ Lots of reading of books. Loving seeing the kids tucked up in bed at night after we've read to them and them wanting to carry on reading until they're tired (Nathan's into a Magic Treehouse book and Danielle likes to look at all her picture books)
~ Stacking all the cuisenaire rods into towers
~ Nathan's been enjoying working through a puzzle/maze/brainteaser book that we found in the library
~ Cadoo and Snakes and Ladders

Tuesday

So much creative energy going on here today...

Danielle put some music on...

...that inspired Nathan to spend a large part of the morning writing a song (a love song at that!), then recording it (I was kicked out of the room while that was done, but then instructed to send it via Facebook to his friend's mum), and then written out all neatly to send to the intended recipient.

After lunch we headed off to the library from some fresh books.

Danielle got out a large box of letters and numbers and went about laying out and figuring out the numbers right up to 20.

Nathan decided to make some sums such as 100,000 + 2 = 100,002

Nathan found a box set of an adult quiz game in the bookcase. When he realised that the quiz was in fact too difficult for him he raced off to create his own quiz...

"What famous landmark in Italy leans?"
"Where was the first pizza (meaning modern day pizza) invented?" and had a multi-choice of Naples, Pompeii, and Mars.

Argh, so many missing things...

Nathan's been writing stories on the computer

His pin-board full of pictures of all the things he wants to be when he's grown up (oh, and freaky photos of him when he was sick with nephrotic syndrome that he likes to keep on his pinboard).

Nathan spotted a TV advert where they were asking for kids to audition as part of competition to appear in a TV ad. So he's been practicing his script and actions in preparation for us to video it. We watched some of the old ads online and he must have liked the look of the cards with letters on them and recalled that we had some similar cards so practiced to lay them out the same.

And watching Master Chef...which inspired the two of them to hatch up a cooking competition.

These are the "meat" choices they can choose from lol.

The two plates for judging...

Brain Box was all the go one day...

Inventing a machine that goes from land into the water...

Eating lunch with chopsticks...

Cracking a very LARGE goose egg that was given to us...yum...(Danielle was a bit scared of what might happen when it was cracked lol).

Well, this morning was International Day. The kids had a great time going around collecting stamps for their passports and tasting lovely treats at the different displays and making neat crafts.

Ready to go...

Making passports

After lunch we headed off to do our groceries. Nathan had collected up various recipes this morning and had his eye on making the Coconut Macaroons (and was the only gluten free thing available that he could eat aside from fresh coconut, pineapple and grapes). This was the first recipe that he's completely read, measured and made himself. Mmmmm...

More trampolining (oh, how we're loving those lighter evenings), playing solitaire and watching Master Chef.

Wednesday

Nathan's contraption...

Danielle's aeroplane ready for passengers...

Danielle's restaurant ready for customers...

Busy reading their menus...

Oops, we forgot about homeschool gym...so we went out for a walk around the big block for 1/2 hr.

And then friends popped over for a play after school...

Lego, reading, computer games, trampoline, painting...