Weekly Report - 6 March

It's Autumn, the morning mists have returned to the valley, and the rhythm of our days changes gradually with the circle of the year.

The last week or two has seen a lot of variety for us as we settled into the new school year,  started to enjoy more reading and games by the fire, and also took advantage of the occasional sunny day to fit in outside activities. Here, snowflakes #1 and #2 are grazing on blackberries while Daddy Snow and I gather firewood in the gully. I was impressed that, in between the eating, they have actually managed to bring me buckets of berries (although possibly the prospect of an apple and blackberry pie had some hand in this).

We've been using our 'bucket lists' (slips of paper in a bucket!) for a while, to motivate the adults in the family to get some of those odd tasks we've been procrastinating on done. Now we've started an extra bucket for Family Fun. In there we put all those ideas that come up for activities we could do at some point. When one gets drawn out, we either do it that day - if practical - or we put it in our calendar to do. This way we make sure we find time to act on all those great ideas, and there's also the added advantage of there being three buckets, which has dramatically reduced the amount of bickering over who gets to draw the pieces of paper out of the buckets.

The first activity we drew from the Family Fun bucket  was "Go for a family bike ride". This involved a fair bit of preparation getting all the bikes repaired and adjusted, attaching the bike rack to the car, and locating helmets for everyone; we also realised that both the elder snowflakes have almost grown out of their bikes (thank goodness for Freecycle and the Tip Shop), but we ended up having a lot of fun. We rode along the cycleway from Hobart to New Town; there was great excitement when we went under the Tasman Bridge, and again when we crossed the railway line (NB we don't actually have passenger trains in Tasmania, so anything train related is somewhat of a novelty down here). Afterwards we watched the very large and fancy kites being flown on the Cenotaph lawn, as the snowflakes ran around madly playing 'Beowulf chasing the death-dragon's shadow'.

Meanwhile, I got to tackle the job of decluttering a shelf in the closet, and one of the things I cleared out to get rid of was some old makeup, probably dating back to my pre-snowflake days. Instead of throwing it away, I was persuaded to re-use it as face-paint for the children. They couldn't understand what would be the point of painting their faces "with no pictures" (clearly we haven't raised little would-be beauty pageant entrants - thank goddess for that!) so we had to add some flowers and hearts and things. Heaps of dressing up and role playing games ensued, ranging from sword-fighting games to Flappers Flying School for young ducks and chickens.

Last weekend it was Clean up Australia Day, so we headed down the road with our gloves and bags to pick up litter. #3 was very cute as she earnestly announced "I'm cleaning up Straylia!" every time she put something into her bag.

We have spent a lot of time socialising of late, with children visiting us, us visiting friends, and several trips to Fun Factory, KidzBizzz and local playgrounds to meet up with other children. One nice part of being school free is that the snowflakes have not been socialised to only want to play with children their own age, so their friends range from babies through to adults.

The snowflakes are in the grip of Famous Five mania, and it looks as though I am doomed to read the entire excruciating 21 volumes aloud, as the snowflakes are enjoying them as much as I did as a child. There are, though, many interesting things to learn and discuss, and a host of activities we can tie in with the books. And I'm deviously dawdling with ordering them from the library so that we can read other chapter books in  between.

We're also in the process of cleaning out the games cupboard and rediscovering some of the games that have been neglected over summer. With snowflake #3 finally past the stage of barging in and messing up the board /cards if the rest of us try to play a game, a lot of new possibilities have opened up for educational and fun games.