Sliced bread and slime

Tuesday, June 26, 2018

At the community centre where we have violin lessons there was lots of bread left for the taking. Erin found an unsliced fruit loaf, in a "traditional" shape and fell in love with it! For her, an unsliced, high top loaf was so unusual and amazing that we just "had to have it"!

It made me smile as in my childhood it was the exact opposite - a loaf of sliced bread would have been thought of as so modern and exciting (my mum made most of our bread each day).

And this week has been filled with perfecting the perfect slime recipe (I am torn between loving the free play and experimentation and their excitement and hating the mess).

But I have to say, this batch below turned out pretty good. Of course, they're not exactly sure what they did so they haven't been able to replicate it.

kites

Thursday, June 21, 2018

A catch up post from quite a while ago: Spring + wind = kites

First you make them

Then you fly them!

Leave a Comment Erin, homeschool, Natalie, outdoors

sporting and outdoor activities

Tuesday, June 19, 2018

A catch up post of photos of our recent outdoor activities:-

Lots of bike rides ......

.... and bushwalks.

They both rollerskate around our house and get pretty fast!

This term we have done quite a bit of ice skating too.

After the rains!

Some trampolining.

And of course lots of circus!

A little bit of butter makes it better

A couple of weeks ago the girls made butter. This was scheduled into Natalie's science lessons (the changing nature of mixtures) but it has also come up quite often via Little House on the Prairie.

It was fun to do - I remember loving to make butter as a child too.

Mixing, mixing, mixing ...........

Draining/squashing out the buttermilk

Our substitute butter pats

Our pat of butter

And we used some in Charlie's "Owt of Lenton Tarte" which I though quite appropriate. Charlie and I have recently done an online course on royal food in late middle ages and he made this pie, so called as it has all the ingredients in it that you are not supposed to eat during lent, ie butter, cream and cheese. It's basically a cheese pie and it tasted surprisingly good.

Our filling was more liquidy than the one in the recipe and so it oozed out and burned a bit on the tray, but that didn't affect the pie really.

Charlie insisted on making the pastry too - it worked very well. And it was the first time I/we had made a pie without using a pie dish - the pastry was "pleated" and stood up by itself!

On its way into the oven

And now out of the oven

Leave a Comment Charlie, Erin, homeschool, HSIE, kids cooking, Natalie, science

Animals

Monday, June 18, 2018

These are just random photos of animals that pass through our lives, some are pets and some are not.

Tadpoles

Sunday, June 17, 2018

I am going to do a few "catch up posts" - posts about things which happened before I started this blog. I would have taken photos of the "event", and now I have somewhere to put the photos, so here goes.

First up - tadpoles!

We have a fishpond (an old bath) in our backyard with goldfish in it which manage to survive no matter what! In fact, the only time they died and needed replacing was when I cleaned it out. The water level in this pond goes up and down depending on the weather, at times we have had hungry crows feasting, the algae and water plants have almost taken over, we have even had babies (that was very exciting, I didn't know that baby goldfish start out black), and sill the goldfish survive!

At times, especially over the summer, we have heard frogs (never seen them though). And then one day Erin came in super-dooper excited - she had caught a tadpole! She thought initially it was a baby goldfish, but sure enough, it was a tadpole - and there were so many of them! We were all so excited and I quietly patted myself on the back for having an obviously healthy pond (obtained completely from neglect) and providing an oasis in suburbia for frogs.

But Mother Nature rules, and slowly the tadpole numbers dwindled, until they were all gone. And then a few weeks later another super-dooper excited Erin came running in - she had caught a tadpole! And this one had legs and a tail and was quite big (relatively). It must have hidden well as she found it in the pigface (a seaside plant) which trails into the water. However, perhaps due to our interference, we didn't see it anymore after a few days.

But it was so wonderful to see that in our own suburban backyard.

Flying the Nest

Saturday, June 16, 2018

Well, our oldest boy has flown the coop - off to America for three months to work at a summer camp. Not really missing him yet (as it just feels he's been away for a day or two), but I know it will hit us shortly.

Here are some snaps from the few days before departure.

With Charlie

With Rory

With Auntie Christina

We rented an apartment close to the airport the night before Callum left as he had an early flight - here are the girls enjoying a wonderfully deep bubble bath!

A Little Bit of Art....

Friday, June 8, 2018

A few weeks ago we went with another homeschooling family to visit the local art gallery. What piqued the other mum's and my interest was an exhibit of photos taken by artist Janet Tavener in and around Iceland's ice caves.

While these were certainly beautiful and interesting, we were unexpectedly taken by a series of hand painted linocuts that told the story of a puffin family, with a message about ocean pollution and global warming. The artist, Rew Hanks, has made a book to go with the exhibition called "The Big Catch", but it seemed to be a one off; though we did put our names down on an "expressions of interest" list - so maybe it will be printed in the future. I didn't want to take photos of every linocut, but this links to a gallery's website where you can see them all.

The gallery has a beautiful Japanese garden attached to it which is always calming to walk around (even when you are feeding the apparently starving monstrous carp).