We've been taking a bit of time over...

...sorting out our house, as I injured myself on Mother's Day cutting the taties. Why was I cooking on Mother's Day? Everything was taking so long getting done with the moving of rooms and the paludarium.

So, my pinky now has a severed nerve, the top of my finger is comfortably numb (I now know what that means). So typing etc is proving not as easy as I am used to... but for good news, I've got something to share! I've did my first digiscrap with all free stuff from around the web (thank you for sharing!), and here it is:



Hopefully we will be back to normal soon. We have some stuff to catch up on and rearrange still, as I have had a disability (Joke!), just a small injury, bad enough though to mean I can't get it wet for a week or take the bandage off. So no more taties or washing up or washing!!! But I have to sort my scrapping space so as I can do some scrapping, and I've promised some one on one time with each of the children tommorrow for various activities so I will post that. If you are at all interested you can see the Paludarium (and its various stages, including the latest) right here. Well, I will do my best to blog over the next few days much more regularly, loving this so much, Q.

Loving Life!

See I have been Scrapping! So this one I did a couple of weeks ago and haven't had time since...

Raven's Sand Paintings^^

Well, we've been doing alot of informal learning of late, lots of reading to each other as always, lots of art work, listening to music, using the computer for learning (Rainforest Maths again, Dora and Thomas work for Raven, Utube for Labyrinth).

Confession to make. I've been doing a lot of catching up on uni work (I've got all my assignments in on time AND caught up so far). So, I've let the children do a fair bit for themselves. Luckily for me, they have learnt to be very good self-starters, and have been doing some wonderful things. Labyrinth made a "lift the flap book" about a Bratz Rock Concert in City Partk, Dante made a dinosaur picture which included a "lift the flap" so you could see little eggs inside and Kai has been doing alot of drawing and he does that really well. Raven did the above "Sand Paintings", to his and my delight, a bit of one on one time.

Dante's Pterdactyl.

Dante draws alot. This was just sooo cute though I had to post it. And below is Labyrinth's Scrap page of her Champ Camp, Feb this year. Its "about" the animal cafe they did on the last day!

Labyrinth's Champ Camp.

Last night we enjoyed a visit to a friends house, who has children around the ages of Labyrinth and Dante. We enjoyed 'havesting' walnuts, lush quasi-minestrone soup, and the company of some wonderful people. Thank You!

Well, until next time, Q.

A Fresh Beginning*

We've begun our lessons again. I've set up the 'calendar', which I will get a pic up of soon. The computers are yet to be completed.
I've even done some scrapping, but have to finish it before I post.
So: this is how the lessons worked so well yesterday. I got Labyrinth, Kai and Dante up to the white board, and we started with Sun Ray then added them together to make sunray, we did this with as many sun prefixes as we could think of sunrise, sunset, sunbeam etc, then we got on to Sunday. From there we discussed the days of the week, their origins and how to spell them. They were really into it, it was so organic! They liked the idea that there were reasons for the days names.
Then we began learning the germanic names of the week ie montag, dienstag, mittwoch, donnerstag, freitag, samstag and sonnetag (sp?). They recited them to me and I told them midweek seemed to make more sense to me than Wednesday.
After a break we did some addition on the white board, they called out the answers, it was a review kind of thing and for me to gauge if they'd forgotten anything (which they hadn't - *sigh of relief*), in fact Kai surprised me by getting them all right!
After which Labryinth happily did a board full of sums, and Dante did half a board full of sums, and they both got them all right.
Freecycle, as I've mentioned is a wonderful thing. We recieved some great kids books from a fellow recycler and put them to good use already. There was even a book of multiplication tables. YAY!
I also gained a heap of frames I'm going to use as off the page projects. Can't wait! My first will be for my husbands up and coming birthday, I'll be using black and white photos, with a black and white background.
Yesterday was payday, so the children got some new things with their pocket money, Dante got more small fish animals, of course! Fish stickers, and gum. Kai got cars. Labyrinth got a baby capsule for her bratz baby Chloe. Raven got Dora the Explorer PJs. We put on some clothes/pjs on layby too...
Life couldn't be sweeter (excepting for owning our own property with a private pier and a boat).
Be well, enjoy life.