Not that much will actually change for us. If anything, our summers have more educational opportunities in two months than the school year's ten.
Our facilitator visit was, as always, fabulous. We have a fantastic facilitator and always look forward to his visits. We were his last visit of the day, and he was able to stay for about 3 1/2 hours. We happily could have kept him longer. *L*
Library days will continue, though with our habit of taking out so many items, we haven't been going every week unless we have lots to return or something on hold waiting for us. Youngest and I are still going to the odd park day, though she doesn't want to go to them any more than Eldest does. Youngest gets along with some of the kids, but doesn't enjoy some of the others. While there are a lot of difference between home schooled kids and public schooled kids, some things are still the same. One of those is that some kids act really nice with their parents are around, then change personalities as soon as the adults are out of the picture. While I'm sure my own kids do that same, and I consider it pretty normal to some extent, there are those where the change is pretty dramatic. I suppose it could be worse. None of them have threatened her and pulled a knife, like has happened with Eldest (not that this worked. It was a cheap POS, and Eldest just showed her K-bar, which we bought her for her birthday. The kid had no idea how to handle a knife, either).
That's just part of the issue. Youngest just doesn't have a lot of interest in the goings on at the park. It's unfortunate, as she used to have quite a bit of fun on park days. It doesn't help that the friends she did develop ended up going back to South Africa. For the next school year, I think we'll start getting involved with another home school group as well. They have some interesting activities that I think the girls would really enjoy.
With Eldest already staying home on park days, we don't make it out every week anymore. The days and location will change in the summer, and right now, I don't know that we'll be able to make very many. Last year, I think we only managed one.
We skipped today's park day, as I had a lot of things that needed to be done. We're working on getting our piano shipped out from Winnipeg - finally! After finally finding a small number of companies actually willing to move a piano between provinces (a lot of moving companies won't, and dedicated piano moving companies tend to be local moves only), I made some phone calls and got a bunch of estimates. It's going to be a lot more expensive than I expected. Did you know it's cheaper to have a car shipped, then a piano? Go figure.
Today was transplanting day for our herbs. For now, I only have two long planters that fit over our balcony rail, plus a deep pot. I was able to plant the tarragon and rosemary in the deep pot, then split the chive and thyme in one planter, basil and Italian parsley in the other. Now I need to figure out what to use to direct seed my greens and carrots. The carrots need a pot as deep as my large one, but I'd like to find something more rectangular, so I can get a decent amount planted. I'll have to do some hunting and see what I can come up with. I'm not in too much of a hurry, as our balcony is going to be redone soon, so anything on there will need to be moved.
We tried a new recipe today. Green onion cakes. It turned out to be ridiculously easy, though the recipe doesn't make the same kind of cakes as what we've had in restaurants. Eldest made the first batch while I was transplanting. The dough needed some resting time, then she got the cakes rolled out while I fried them in oil. It made things go by nice and fast. They made part of a delicious lunch. Eldest and Dh made a double batch after supper, since a single batch wasn't enough to have anything left for him to try. I think I should have included green onions in my balcony garden choices. ;-)
I was also supposed to start on some curtains today, too. Technically, I did get started. Unfortunately, the fabric I'm using is very slippery on one side, but tends to grip on the other. As I was sewing a side seam on the curtain (having already sewn tubes to make tabs for the rod), the fabric slowly started twist. It didn't help that I had to keep stopping and restarting to remove the pins as I went along. I was past half the length when I realized I had to stop and fix it. Fixing it meant undoing the whole thing. *sigh*
Youngest has been working on a few things. She's writing out some character profiles for her stories and doing crochet. Eldest had picked up some really nice, high quality yarn. The two of them put their heads together and came up with a design for fingerless gloves. Youngest made a few testers with inexpensive yarn before moving on to the expensive stuff. Smart thinking, that.
(click on image for full size)
The gloves are worked from the fingers down, so the colour at the end of the first one (top) became the beginning of the second one (bottom). Eldest is really happy with them. It looks like youngest has started another set - this time in fuzzy pink. :-DAlong with figuring out how to get our piano out, we'll need to start looking at cars. Minivans, actually. We're going to replace our $50 beater with something safe to make road trips in. If all goes to plan, we'll buy a new-to-us vehicle at the end of July, and be able to visit the families in Manitoba in August. It's been 4 years since we've seen most of them.
Once we have a reliable vehicle again, that should open up quite a few things. There are a lot of places we'd like to visit, and even a family geology camp in Drumheller we'd like to take in. The fee for the camp is really low. It's getting there that's the problem. We just didn't want to take any chances with the car we have now. Especially with it's tendency to stall unexpectedly on hot days!
Speaking of hot days, we hit 20C today, and our townhouse DIDN'T turn into an oven! This, even though we have one side facing south with unobstructed daylight from sunrise until shortly before sunset. Yeah, it can get warm, but nothing like the troubles we had in the apartment.
I'm really looking forward to the next few months.
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