New Arrivals

So I've been a bit absent the last few weeks with posting on here, as baby no 4 arrived peacefully on 24th June.  He was born comfortably in our lounge room and has been name Irving.  So far he's been settling into life well, and is getting lots of attention from all the bigger members of the family.

We got through all the homeschool work that I was hoping to do before Irving's arrival, which was nice; though Willow has a couple of written pieces to finish.  Gabriel and I started work on English and looking at "Beowulf" and Padraic Colum's version of King Arthur. 

This is from Gabriel's last bit of geometry before our break.

This is Willow's last star.

The weekend before Irving's birth was very busy as Gabriel was hoping to get to WASO's performance of "Lord of the Rings", and I'd told him we'd have to see about the baby.  Well Friday came along, and we knew that the WASO performance was almost sold out, and it didn't look like the baby  was coming, so Damien and Gabriel got tickets.  Both of them really enjoyed the performance, and even got photographed for the social pages of the Western Australian!

Anyway after that Gabriel said his weekend would be perfect if Damien and I went out Saturday night, and he and Willow could hang out at home.  Irving still wasn't ready to appear Saturday, so off we went rockabilly dancing. 

Since Irving's arrival, we've mostly been taking things easy.  He was born early Monday morning, and Damien took the kids to our dancing lesson, but otherwise we mostly hung out at home and had some guests pop in.  Now that actual school holidays have started Willow and Gabriel are doing a couple of classes, and Willow is also helping out with her circus school.

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2025

Funny reading this, as it was Irving's birthday yesterday!  Willow came up and stayed with us for it, and baked him a blackforest cake, and we had a lovely day out celebrating his 12th birthday.

Dancing, Numbers, Astronomy.

Our dancing class recommenced this week, so we had our first lesson in timing and harmony for Rockabilly.  I'm not expecting to get to most of them, since baby no 4 is due so soon, but hopefully I'll be able to watch some and get some direction from Willow, on anything that I miss.  It's been great getting into going to these lessons and seeing how everyone is learning something from them.  Even Arden who sits and draws, whilst the lesson is on, has picked up a few of the basic foot steps.

This week Arden and I have been working on numbers- using the JUMP curriculum and also modelling them in modelling wax.

Gabriel has been working on the second half of his astronomy block. He's been looking at moon phases, and constellations this week as well as doing some reading and writing about Venus.  Our form drawing took the form of an old style compass to compliment this week's work.

This is mine.

 

Willow has been busy working on her last segment of history for this block- reading Dr Zhivago, and looking at the Industrial Revolution, WW1, WW2 and the period of peace in between. I decided that Dr Zhivago would make a good book for this period, as it covers the Russian class system, the Revolution and  changes occurring due to war- so a fairly broad scope of some of the issues of the time. She's decided to make the focus of her written piece, this time, about Cadbury, and how ethically minded he was regarding his workers.

Meanwhile she's getting very adept with her circus skills. Here's a one handed handstand!

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2025

We've been using this video series by moves method for hip strengthening around here, and I just came across this particular episode discussing various movements that are important for longevity.  Hand stands are part of them, os it seems apt timing to see Willow doing a one armed one, back in the day.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c9stJnjrIoA