Scrambled School

Monday - Mom needed a day out and about for errands - and it did take all day too! We got home about 4pm. It was a pretty successful day considering the long list we took with us, and the kids all coming too.  Not one any of us would like to repeat any time soon though.

Tuesday - We attempted a normal school day, but it was not very smooth as the house was still in a we-didn't-get-to-our-weekend-tidyup-because-we-were-hardly-home state of disorganization. So, it kinda felt like we just added to the mess and disorganization :o)

Wednesday - We abandoned ship (home) and spent the morning at church, had a picnic lunch, and went to the Museum of History as it was free for Remembrance Day.  The idea was to explore the Hall of First Peoples as we've just finished our first Canada unit, but the real interest was of course the Children's Museum.


Grace and Jasmin were all excited for the Children's museum, but soon discovered it catered to children younger than them.  They still  found enough to enjoy though.







Grace took up the challenge of origami, and learned about kirigami, but in the end only came away with a paper airplane, and Aiden's form of origami....







Thursday - We were back to normal school in a still weekend messy house, so it was rather scattered and not quite complete by the end of the morning. None of us felt like trying to finish in the afternoon though.

Friday - We squeezed in a bit of school before going to lunch and afternoon at NiNi's.  It had been a long time since we've been, so there was extra excitement about it and Aiden was all for taking a full crate of toys to show NiNi and YeaYea!

We finally remembered to get new prayer card photos taken - very last minute as we needed them for Sunday at the start of our church's missions week. Thankfully it didn't take us that many tries to come up with a good one.  We'd planned to get them printed that night, but we were too late so it had to until Saturday.

Saturday - The morning was spent running around doing errands preparing for the coming busy week at church (like wresting with Walmart photo machines for an hour to get a decent print) while the girls were at Chinese school.
Then, we went to a friend's house for lunch and a much awaited game of Settlers! Grace was thrilled to have 4 adults to play against, and, if we'd managed to stay long enough to finish the game, she just might have won...

And the school scrambling got even worse in the following week...

Monday we gave a half-hearted attempt to catch up a little. I can't even remember why we didn't get all that much done!

Since we were all at church Monday evening for a missions week event and quite late to bed, we decided to do school in the afternoon on Tuesday. Only it was an absolutely gorgeous day that we couldn't resist and we had our own "forest school" down by the river.

Wednesday we were out all day for missions events and in bed even later, so not much school got done today either... we didn't even among to catch up on last week's work!

And tomorrow? The girls are still not home from church (Aiden and Mom are at home because Aiden has a croupy sounding cough) with Dad at 9:30pm so school will shift to the afternoon... only we have to make a library trip tomorrow, which is only open in the afternoons Fridays, so there goes school for the week.

Hopefully next week is better - certainly hope so, as December beginning after that means more disruption of schedules!

Halloween Alternative ++ by Grace and Mom

Harvest Festival

The harvest festival was GREAT! With 4 bouncy castles(1 for under kindergarten age, 1 a platform "battle" for partners, 1 a race against someone -covering half of the gym!- and 1 was your plain, everyday bouncy castle), an  I'm-not-sure-how-many-mini-games in the church hall (bowling, mini golf, etc.), a cardboard maze, AND snacks!

Main attractions for me and Jasmin were: cardboard maze (we went through it 3 times!) and the race bouncy castle. (it's actually hard to get two certain people to race!!) I met up with one of the Grace's (there's 3 Graces? 5? I'm not sure) and we decided to stick together. At the beginning, you got a card with a name tag and a place for 12 stickers on it. You'd get a stamp for every activity you'd do (and redo!) that evening. Me, Jas, and Aiden filled our cards. Unfortunately, Grace 2 didn't. Filling our cards meant we could trade our cards at the end for a bag of candy.

This was the AWANA night just before Halloween. Daddy took them as usual so Mommy could do the school planning.  Mom kinda want to go - it was a family night thing - but after the reports of how loud and crowded it was, she was glad enough to have missed it.  They came home louder and more wound up than usual :) Good kids that they are, their bags of candy went in the freezer without Mom saying so, and they haven't yet asked for any!

Halloween Alternative

There were 2 parts to the halloween alternative: 1. go swimming(!) 2. eat pizza. Swimming wasn't as great as I hoped, but it was ok. Swimming test:swim across the entire deep end. Slightly tiring, but worth it. Result: pass. Difference:Before:stay close to parents, NO diving, wear life jacket for fun stuff, etc. After (if you pass): go wherever you like, diving, no life jacket,etc. Jas couldn't eat Hawaiian :( But mom made her a gluten free pizza and put pineapple on it. Jas & her friend played boring/confusing games, and the adults were talking. I really need some older kids to play with!

But that night we made plans for a later date withe these friends to play Settlers - one of Grace's favourite games, so hopefully it will all be redeemed.

We really liked the pool - it is one of the newer ones, and is well laid out.  We were all rather annoyed at the strict, rather-too-many safety rules, but having a tarzan rope swing, mini foam canoes, and diving boards kept us all pretty happy.  Aiden is certainly over his fear of indoor pools - we got reminded more than once for letting him out of our reach - and would be swimming on his own soon if we went regularly. Maybe we will in winter...


Planetarium Fiasco

We have just finished our astronomy course that we started for the summer, and Mom wanted us to go to a planetarium.  After web searching, we found out where to go, and that it was free for the last hour (4-5). But when we went, the GPS had a wrong idea of where it was so things got pretty tense in the car, but we persevered and found it.  It is a small museum, and not so easy to find.  The next thing that didn't go as planned was the museum staff told us there was no planetarium there!  But their website talks about the programs that they run in it?!?! We checked out the space section since we were there.  Not that big, but it was a little interesting at least.  Hopefully we have better luck trying the Museum of Civilization on Nov 11!