Night is coming.
I can only tell because the light coming through the unmovable blinds is dimming and I am starting to feel hungry. Otherwise it is like a twilight zone when you have been in hospital for a while. Canned air set to a constant temperature of 'comfortable', beeps and pings which somehow disorient the mind just when it is relaxing, no view of the outside world at all. A faint smell of antiseptic and hand wash, mashed potatoes and floor cleaner. My son lies sleeping next to me right now, completely exhausted by his ordeal of the last 48 hours. He said before " my legs feel like they weigh a few tonnes each", and even a 10 meter walk from his bed to the fish tank down the hall is truly like running a marathon for him.
However, the positives far outweigh the negatives. He has been effectively operated on and the prognosis is all good. We caught it in time before any major damage was done. It didn't happen on the road or while camping in the bush somewhere unfamiliar. And now, I have time, away from housework and packing to play on the iPad for the first time!!!!

My apologies. When you are in the thick of things you assume that everyone else knows what's going on ( and thanks to Facebook, most people do!).

Flex had a perforated (burst) appendix and underwent keyhole surgery yesterday afternoon to remove it. His first real operation and he was so brave, strong and kept a twinkle in his eye throughout. Except when the morphine took hold and his eyes glazed over. That was yucky to see but I know it helped take the pain away for him. Phew! The curve balls you get thrown as a parent....now I will log off and just spend some time looking at my sleeping son. As they get older we spend less time doing this, but truly, they are so incredibly beautiful when they are asleep.

So, my trusty 21st centurians...we have plunged headfirst into the swelling tides of technology and bought an iPad. The 'new' iPad if you must know. It was a sweet and painless gumtree transaction and yesiree we are LOVING the sexy little thing!
We took it out on it's first excursion to the Biennale of Sydney yesterday and it was a most excellent travelling companion and helpful homeschooling assistant. 'Kids bored in the car? Never fear - iPad is here! Wether it's hangman or scribblenaughts, you can drive on, assured that the kiddies are playing happily AND learning at the SAME TIME!!!!'
I think we're going to have to give it a name......maybe Imogen or Eilleen.....it's only been a day and already it feels like part of the family. (;)

Cockatoo island is always such a fabulous place to visit and covering it with funky art is just a marriage arranged in heaven. The boys had already been a few weeks ago with Gav so they were dragging me around excitedly showing me this and that and how this lights up when you clap our makes a noise when you dance near it....
I am always so impressed with people's vision. I consider myself extremely aesthetic by nature, but  seeing how a person has thought a thought and turned it into a huge scale thing of beauty and multi layered thought provocation is just so cool.
Like the cold mist that was pumped out and permeated through the industrial and sunny space, making you shiver and laugh at the same time, walking away with tiny droplets of water in your eyelashes.
Or the delicate mobiles constructed from plastic and lab equipment which contain heat and touch sensors so they move and glow when you interact with them, making you feel like you are in a magical undersea garden from the future.
Or the handmade paper hanging which you could peek through and made you feel like you were in a dream....
Or the walkway of soft hanging ropes which my Lucky made me walk through with my eyes closed. He held my hand softly, encouraging me to 'imagine what the ropes could be....' and then we compared notes while watching his little iPad movie of the experience....
Or the 'midden' of oyster shells and tea cups which captivated my two active boys long enough that they drew teacup designs while sitting on the concrete.
Or the 'Museum of Copulatory Organs' which featured molds and casts of enlarged insect genitals. 'Whoa' said my friend as we gazed at bug penises, 'Gross!' said her son.
And the reflections. There were many times I was captivated by the reflections of the artworks, and the theme of 'shadows' is one with just so much juicy richness and barenaked truth to it....
My fearless and fantastic friend and I got to sit in the sun and talk shadows while the kids explored the island in a small gang of home schooled goodness. They were beautiful to behold.

But I think the most beautiful thing I saw the whole day was a brown speckled minty green seagull egg. Perfect and with a real life inside it. Sorry Eilleen, you may be able to tell me what the weather is like in Peru, but you can't lay an egg

The last week has been interesting, fun and challenging on many levels. At each twist and turn I have been faced with decisions and opportunities to learn, fun times to be had and my personal integrity and passions to consider. My capacity for joy and growth has only expanded as a result.
I will write one tagline for each photo - see if you can figure out which goes with which!

Learning can be delicious!
From bored to board.
A sun drenched classroom with interested observers.
A widows place to remember.
Fuzzball baseball - surely a new sport?
Come fly with me.
Gravity grabs me.
The feeding frenzy of the modern northern beaches woman.
My night with the swinger sisters.
A yummy 60th.
Beauty and function.
The buddy system.

So there we have it - a week in taglines

So, we have done the Taj Mahal, and due to the organic nature of our home schooling life, and the fact that they are only $3.99 at Aldi, we are now studying another wonder of the world - the Great Wall of China.
This was easier to assemble due to less tricky domes, more right angles and the fact that we had a bit of building practice notched onto the belt...and led to great discussion.
Lucky: "Which one is better - the Taj Mahal because it was a palace built for love, or the Wall because it  is so big you can see it from space?"
Flex: "There is no better or worse remember, they are just different."

We have now added China to our list of countries we must go on an excursion to. Great food AND great wall as the kids pointed out.

Recently, I was exposed to the practice of the 'Daily 5' for literacy. A groovy homeschooling friend who is a trained teacher with a burning passion for children's literature lent me the book and a bunch of great resources to practice with. It has been marvellous to have a framework in place. The Daily 5 consist of:
Read quietly to yourself
Read aloud to someone else
Practice writing
Work on words and spelling
Listen to reading

So every day we do these 5 things. A few of them happen really without effort (such as listening to reading which the boys do all the time in the form of audio books and being read to at night) but some of the others I have struggled with implementing in ways that are both interesting and effective. Now with the Daily 5 we do some writing and spelling most days, and I know that keeping the activities fresh and fun leads to happier kids and information being absorbed. So it's shopping lists, emails to friends, typing in multi player minecraft, writing signs on their own personal whiteboards, hangman and the other day a treasure hunt where they had to read words (Lucky) and unscramble words (Flex) in order to locate their treasure. This became such a fun activity that Lucky happily wrote clues and got to enjoy the pleasure of watching Flex run madly around the house when a clue unscrambled itself quickly and endure the torture of sitting and trying to not drop hints when Flex spent a good 5 minutes trying to unscramble the elusive 'peanuts'.

The allure of hanging out on the freedom farm is great when we all have a day off together, and the list of jobs to do is pretty much infinite. However yesterday we bucked the system, piled the bikes into the trusty tarago and hit the coast. Picking up Gav's new birthday bike on the way, we celebrated the sunshine by riding the dirtbike track at Umina and then cruising to Ettalong. Some new discoveries were made along the way such as the awesome reverse trampolines at Umina caravan park, that weaving your bike on the hard packed sand on the beach is a great way to make funky tracks and that everyone has their own unique way of eating a pie. Some turn it upside down, some eat the top off first, some mush it all together and some turn it into a taco. And none of those ways are better or worse, they are just different!

And I couldn't resist including a shot of the mist and frost from the balcony this morning....freezing but beautiful