We love tak­ing walks in the neigh­bour­hood. Sometimes we go for quick lunch at a favorite café, oth­ers we enjoy a drink of some kind and then there are the more prac­ti­cal walks that take us to the library or the local shops.

If we decide to go grab a drink, we would pick some cat tails on the way from our spe­cial area and swing them around until they brake. The Dod gets his own handed to him, rid­ing on my back, and then he is expected to try to tickle the bounc­ing girls around me.

I love this wall.
The color, the tex­ture, all of it.

Little B skips ahead often, as she is my non-stop child; my per­petuo mobile; the child that climbs just about any ver­ti­cal object she faces; and yet, all this activ­ity and train­ing has not made her less likely to be a party of injury events around here. Quite the oppo­site, she can get a scrape just by breath­ing, I am sure of it. But, as I have always said, you are not a child unless you have bruised legs and a band-aid some­where on your body. She is def­i­nitely a child.

She skips, and skips, and skips until the street, which we cross together and then she is off again, unless she finds some­thing inter­est­ing and then she is behind call­ing for us to wait.

Miss Fab, my dogol­o­gist child (I dont think I have made you privy to her new obses­sion with dogs), is usu­ally closer, explor­ing and chat­ting and melt­ing with love for her brother. We usu­ally have to guess how many dogs we will see on our out­ing and we know we will see at least two; for we have the chao-chao we love to stop by and say hi to.

He is quiet and we could have missed him, had he not stuck his black nose under the fence that one time, back when, before he was our dog. It even took our res­i­dent pro­fes­sional dogol­o­gist a bit of time to fig­ure out the breed, there is so lit­tle of him showing.

Last time he made these sad noises, behind the beau­ti­ful white fence, and we decided that he is lonely all day, while the own­ers work. We bought his story until a noisy lit­tle fella jumped about around him, as though to prove his exis­tence or worth as a friend, for they are two, behind the fence. Nosy and Noisy. Our dogs.

Spring does make our walks more col­or­ful and there is so much to see and touch and pick.

Flowers are dis­sected and exam­ined, and paper bark trees are relieved of a bit of their coats in the name of explo­ration too. We love seed pods, cause there seem to be an unlim­ited vari­ety of ways plants have fig­ured out to spread their genes into the world — seeds with wings, spiky seeds, mil­lions tiny ones, pods, singing choir look­ing pods et cetera, et cetera.

No mat­ter how many times we do our walk, it never gets bor­ing and we always find some­thing new and interesting.

Still, its nice when we arrive at our cur­rent favorite water­ing place. Its even bet­ter if our pre­ferred inside sit­ting spot is free — it has enough chairs, the chairs are puffy and com­fort­able and there is enough table in front to cause trou­ble and spill stuff.

And as much as I want to tell you we leisurely enjoy our warm drinks, barely upright in the big puffy chairs and feet sprawled on the table in front, I cant. Because this one may look mel­low and all classy, well-mannered young gen­tle­man in his cardi­gan, but its all a lie.

At first the apple juice may sit there, amongst the pen­cils, undisturbed.

Miss Fab may be able to play some word games, while let­ting her yo-yo rest and wait­ing for the cinos.

Which come won­der­fully frothy with sprin­kling of brown choco­late goodness.

My drink of choice is a long black.

No sugar, no milk.

For those of you that won­der what in the world that is, its like a long espresso; watery strong espresso.

I love to drink it while catch­ing up on the newspapers.

But this one unleashes, shakes off the drowsy feel­ing he may have devel­oped rid­ing on my back and sets off.

He wants every­thing; to try it all, him­self. So armed with my unused tea­spoon he walks around and dips it in every­thing, drips stuff all over that big olé table, mixes things that should not be mixed.

Miss Fab attempts to restrain him, gen­tly, by offer­ing her baby­cino as a sac­ri­fice to the com­mon good. And this works for about half a sec­ond, and then he is off again.

This day was a bit extra crazy, as he was sleepy too, so life just had to bend over for him or else he was going to make it. We, our­selves armed with nap­kins, kept wip­ing behind him, but the end of the road for him was when he started pour­ing to and fro var­i­ous cups and spilled a lake on that table, which didnt look as nice any­more. That marked the end of his free­dom and he was swiftly strapped to my back, tightly, where he spent the rest of the time — blink­ing and rest­ing his tired head on my shoulders.

We did man­age to catch up on the news and elec­tion devel­op­ments and that cof­fee made its way to the depths of my being.

On the way back we take a dif­fer­ent route, just to be wild, or at least not to repeat our­selves. And here I will present to you our jump­ing game. Yours truly came up with it one day, when we were Dod-free, and you may be tempted to just call it long jump­ing, its not, so dont utter it.

Its our extra-special-fun-bike-lane-wild-game.

See — wild!

Its risky too, cause you never know when the extreme bik­ers may wizz by and put your life in danger.

Starting posi­tion:

Trembling knees, men­tal prepa­ra­tion, deep breathing…

Whooosh!

Every jumper is marked and we try to beat each other. I am way out of the kid­dies league. I fly, baby! Fly like the wind; jump straight back home. Not sur­pris­ingly, Little B man­ages to out­jump Miss Fab from time to time. And Mr.Blab? Last time he joined us on a walk, he used the excuse that he is sick and never embar­rassed him­self with an actual result. But I am pretty sure we all know where he will fit, I just won­der if he will make it past the white line…

Then the girls decided to be archeologists.

And dug the sides of the path.

So we can come back home with a pile of rocks.

A pile of rocks that is still in front of the back door and we trip on them to this day.

Miss Fab has been learn­ing how to write lim­er­icks poems in writ­ing class. I had no idea what those are, but after a quick exam­ple and rhythm tuto­r­ial, I got the jist of it.

The form of a lim­er­icks goes like that accord­ing to Wikipedia:

The stan­dard form of a lim­er­ick is a stanza of five lines, with the first, sec­ond and fifth usu­ally rhyming with one another and hav­ing three feet of three syl­la­bles each; and the shorter third and fourth lines also rhyming with each other, but hav­ing only two feet of three syllables.

The lim­er­icks were pop­u­larised by Edward Lear and his won­der­fully named book:

I love the char­ac­ter armed with non­sense; it lov­ingly reminds me of myself sometimes.

Today on the way to writ­ing class we had some fun and made a bunch of poems, poems in motion, lit­er­ally. And here for your hope­ful  enjoy­ment are a few of them.

1
I love my lit­tle old bed
its soft, cosy and red
its small and dash­ing
almost too flash­ing
I cant believe they cov­ered it in lead!

2
I have a very old cat
It needs a much big­ger mat
For she is so lazy
my cat called Maisey
and so extra­or­di­nar­ily fat.

3
I wanted to make a cake
but I didnt know how to bake
Out fell the flour
I made it a tower
and the milk made a per­fect lake.

4
Once I went to the mall
and I saw this one guy fall.
A man called Ted
came up and said:
„Why do they make malls so tall?”

5
Oups! I was eaten by a bear
Why me? This is not fair!
Its warm and cozy
But not so rosy
I am never doing  another dare!

6
Once I tried to climb the  wall
but instead I took a big, big fall.
My knee is bruised,
my jaw is fused,
please, give emer­gency a call.

We have our favorites, but I will be curi­ous if you have one too?

Comments in lim­er­icks get extra points. The points you can spend at that thingy over there, behind the blue stuff…a bit further…there, somewhere…oh, for­get it!

Weeds.

What are weeds? And are they mis­un­der­stood? I am guess­ing that those out there that spend numer­ous hours and money fight­ing with unwanted pesky gar­den guests will be reach­ing with their shak­ing, blood­ied fin­gers through the mon­i­tor for my throat, but calm down, breathe, give this blog­ger a chance.  I will get to my point even­tu­ally, as labo­ri­ously as it may end up being.

We skip the vio­lence and move on the pleas­ant things.Flowers. Imagine a front yard beau­ti­fully scat­tered with emerg­ing flow­ers. Some more fra­grant than oth­ers. The new breed of white, small and gen­tle ones are fill­ing the air with the most mind-swaying aroma. Every time you walk there, it feels like nature’s scent mar­ket. That is what our yard feels like at the moment.

The other day the Dod walks up to me with a flower in his hand and hands it up to me. The smile on my face must have had an impact on him too, because he ran back out with Mr.Blab say­ing more…more…

Next, he comes back and greets me with a small, but wide-toothed smile and hands bulging with freshly-scented, white blos­soms. My heart can only take so much, but this I soaked up to its fullest. I took one of the best bou­quets I have got­ten from the clutch of the two of my favorite hands and buried my nose in the moment.

My new gift now has a prized posi­tion on my desk and its per­fume lingers all around the place.

Freesias.

Some of the most won­der­ful flow­ers I have had the plea­sure of see­ing and smelling. I was not sure what they were, but one of you (thanks, Mina) men­tioned the name and now I am well informed of our gra­cious lit­tle visitors.

Get this though. They are weeds here. Lets just say that when I read that, Mr.Blab and I basi­cally laughed. In our world, a flower that plants itself, grows and exists with­out an ounce of our effort, and to top it all off smells divine and looks more than pleas­ing is noth­ing short of the per­fect plant. THE per­fect plant.

That was part of how my visual and smelling senses were tick­led that day.

Later on I took care of the taste buds.

I am new to bak­ing, but its grow­ing on me. This could be good or bad, or maybe good and bad, but I guess only time will tell. For now I am giv­ing in every once in a while. Remember my burned up first attempt at choco­late tarts? I just had to go back and improve.

So for movie night, again, I made a sec­ond batch. I made more dough than I needed so I quickly made up a savory fill­ing for the extras. I had some old cream cheese and spinach leaves that were call­ing, no, beg­ging to be freed of their fridge mis­ery. The fill­ing ended up like that: a layer of gar­l­icy cream cheese with spinach and that was topped with caramelized onions and cap­sicums. I am not com­pletely sold on the com­bi­na­tion, but they were very pleas­ant and quickly disappeared.

The pièce de résis­tance were the choco­late tarts, though.

The idea for these had stuck in my head from the Master Chef series. Last time I used some recipe I had found on the net, but this time I went and got the infor­ma­tion from the source and the result was a success.

For the dough:

For the filling:

To serve we have been using straw­ber­ries and whipped cream, but the pos­si­bil­i­ties are end­less. I am think­ing it wont be half bad with some crushed nuts on top either.

The result left every­body happy.

The girls were inspired as well and decided to sur­prise us with their own ren­di­tion of a desert for movie night. Sweets buzz up any child and ours are no excep­tion, but their minds were not only fired up by the poten­tial sugar intake. Their cre­ativ­ity was impressed by the ideas of Heston Blumenthal, whos show we adore — Heston’s Feasts. We watched him put chicken in an orange jelly, instead of orange flavour into a chicken, amongst other things.

We got choco­late stuffed straw­ber­ries from our bud­ding chefs. Thanks, Heston!

And our move watch­ing plates were now complete.

With choco­late melt­ing in my mouth and belly, and the fine sum­mer scent of the best darn weeds melt­ing in my senses, I can safely say that this day is wel­comed to visit me again any time.

This, pies and flow­ers kind of day.

Awhile ago I was sweep­ing the back from all the leaves that come down on us in autumn, which is one of the neg­a­tive part of hav­ing so many trees around. Flippidy-Flop and an ALIEN bounces from the pile I am sweep­ing and I jump about like a scared cow, or at least as I assume one such crea­ture would, and pause. And wait for the attack, which inevitably fol­lows in such cases. Nothing. I approach the strange crea­ture, slowly and care­fully.  What in the world is that, I am think­ing to myself and try to hold my shak­ing hands still.  It just stays there, stalk­ing me, star­ing at me with its, what?, painted on eyes. It looked cute in a weird squishy, butt with a thorn kind of way. I poked it with a stick and it did noth­ing, just looked at me with those pre­tend I am not a cater­pil­lar eyes.

I knew the girls would love to see this, so I cov­ered it with a nearby clear plas­tic tray and went on with my busi­ness, although now some­what freaked out and look­ing around for other crea­tures that may want to jump at me. Definitely not one of my proud­est moments.

The kids loved it. Mr.Blab poked it, with his fin­ger! , and they decided we should keep it for a bit and we piled up a selec­tion of leaves and branches in there and cov­ered it up.

Then a few days later the lit­tle bug­ger decided to change the game and turned pupa on us. It had made a lit­tle tent like area from the leaves, which were now stuck to the pave­ment on the edges and in the tent was the lit­tle wrapped up package.

We had no plans to keep it for long, but now we had no choice, we didnt want to leave it unpro­tected, so we left the cover on and checked up on it from time to time.

Nothing seemed to happen.

For awhile.

Then one day our check up revealed the sad end­ing to this short story.

Sorry, fella.

If it helps, you were one won­der­fully beau­ti­ful moth and now I have a new appre­ci­a­tion for your kind.

Moths Rock!

This is pretty much a false first pic­ture for this post, because today was mostly cloudy and rainy kind of day. But I will take a blame for lack­ing visual authen­tic­ity because I loved the birds. And birds always seem to make a day feel bet­ter, unless they are stalk­ing you for your pic­nic food or poop­ing on your head.

We go to a won­der­ful park after writ­ing class on Thursdays. It is hid­den amongst the bushy  greens of the city and you would not think you are in one, unless you jump real high and look around while spin­ning. But since none of us can or want to do that, its a great escape in mel­low land until the schoo­lians (school kids) are released and start to run and scream around the place like free­dom hun­gry beasts. If you sensed some neg­a­tive feel­ings towards them, it aint so. I fully under­stand and com­mis­er­ate with them and their sit­u­a­tion. They need to release a lot of bunched up energy, and I since per­son­ally have no need for it, I pre­fer not to be around to wit­ness it.

So while the school doors are tight shut, we enjoy a world to our­selves. The park is free, the ten­nis courts too. The kids, rang­ing from almost 2 to early teens, go and take it all in, while the grown ups sip on warm drinks and nib­ble and pro­vide lunches. Although the lit­tle ones usu­ally have no time to eat, instead wait till the car ride home to inhale the food.

When the bikes and scoot­ers are not needed any­more, they get deliv­ered to us for safe keep­ing and the rid­ers dis­ap­pear in the dis­tance somewhere.

The rains today cause a bit of change of plans so we ended up see­ing more of the kids than usual.

The lit­tle, lit­tle ones, made the most out of the pud­dles. Mixing them with a found plas­tic spoon, stomp­ing in them til the wet creeps up half way up their pants, are only a few of the joys of the gifts left behind a sprin­kling of rain.

I love Thursdays.

It is refresh­ing to see kids of such a wide age range not only man­ag­ing to stand, but enjoy each other. Its far from strange to have teen boys being silly with a one year old, not because of oblig­a­tion, but because they find the fun in it and feel free to do so with­out any risk of embar­rass­ment. The big kids watch out for the lit­tle wan­der­ing souls, while the later in turn adore the com­pany and skills they can gain from the expe­ri­enced, all-knowing chil­dren. There are no cliques, no ‘besties’, no seg­re­ga­tion and spe­cial groups. A bunch of kids that play free and I have never heard them argue or cause con­flicts of any kind. Refreshing is def­i­nitely one way to describe it. A bit like man­darins shared on the veranda:

At the end of the day, Dodman requested I switch on one of the lamps and hence gave me inspi­ra­tion for some snaps. I won­der if he knew it will make for some pleas­ant imagery…

I am going to be mov­ing this blog to its own domain. I hope it will hap­pen soon, but who knows when I will get around to doing it. I am also doing a slight redesign, which is going quite slow too. This will be espe­cially impor­tant if this trip comes true.

I will try to let you know if any big works/changes are com­ing up, but since I am a bit of an impul­sive per­son, I wanted to warn you not to be sur­prised if you come around and you are greeted by a gob­bledy­gook look­ing page. Just smile, wish me luck and come back later.

At the begin­ning of the week I had the meet­ing with the home­school­ing mod­er­a­tor. Its a once a year event and I dont really like it. Its not that its dif­fi­cult or unpleas­ant. The rea­son is that I dont like how its influ­enc­ing me and how I approach the process as a whole.  I cant com­pletely shake off the nag­ging voice on my shoul­der that keeps on whis­per­ing „Are you doing enough?”, „Hmmm…its been a whole lotta noth­ing for awhile”.

I am sure if there was no mod­er­a­tor or sys­tem look­ing over my shoul­der, the voice will still be there, but the dif­fer­ence will be that it will be my voice, born out of love and con­cern for my chil­dren, not out of con­cern of whether what we are doing is going to be accept­able to some­one else.

We have set­tled on a sys­tem that works though and thank­fully there is a lot of under­stand­ing for nat­ural learn­ing from the moderators.

For the curi­ous out there, here is how this once a year meet­ing goes.

There is a piece of paper the mod­er­a­tor fills and on it are the dif­fer­ent learn­ing areas — English, Maths, Science, Health, LOTE (lan­guage other than English), Society and Environment, Arts. First we go through any work­books that have been done. This time I had the full Maths pro­gram from Singapore that Miss Fab did last year. There was a sci­ence work­book from the same edu­ca­tion sys­tem that got done. And a English work­book we had worked through, but not fin­ished. I brought in the dif­fer­ent soft­ware pro­grams she has used — Spanish and Spelling games and dis­cussed the online games she is using — Intrepica is the lat­est, which is about spelling, vocab­u­lary, com­pre­hen­sion and she seems to enjoy quite a lot.

I listed the dif­fer­ent classes or activ­i­ties Miss Fab had attended — Critical Thinking, StopMation (mak­ing ani­ma­tion with stop motion),  var­i­ous sci­ence labs, ten­nis, ice skat­ing, swim­ming, drama, a sports class where they try dif­fer­ent sports for 4 weeks, writ­ing class (an absolute favorite); attended pup­pet shows, sym­phony orches­tra, tra­di­tional Japanese com­edy per­for­mance, mod­ern dance; vis­its to farms, zoos, rep­tile cen­ter, milk fac­tory, old prison and what­ever else I remem­bered, because I actu­ally dont record these things. Maybe I should, it will surely save me some time and worry.

Then we move on to the jour­nal. From what I hear, every home­school­ing fam­ily has a dif­fer­ent way of show­ing what they do. Some write lengthy reports and make plans for the next year. Others make huge map­ping pages and con­nect every activ­ity they do to the respect­ful learn­ing area. Then there are graphs, excel sheets and the vari­ety is quite wide and shows how dif­fer­ent we all are.

Mine is a jour­nal. A kind of wild scrap book. I print out pho­tos from the year — this time there were about 120 of them. We empty the box that col­lects all the cre­ations, sto­ries, draw­ings, projects, bits and pieces and there starts the glu­ing. Followed by Miss Fab’s embell­ish­ments, draw­ings and cap­tions to the pre­sented visu­als. A lot of the things you would know from here — gar­den­ing, build­ing bak­ery on the dri­ve­way, Chalkville, cook­ing, creations.

My mod­er­a­tor loves this part and leaves the jour­nal for last. Then as she flips through she fills her boxes on her list, as she con­nects the activ­i­ties pre­sented to the learn­ing out­comes she is look­ing for.

The whole process takes about 1.5–2 hours.

She always seems happy and is very encour­ag­ing and appre­cia­tive of my job as a teacher. She gets that twin­kle in her eye and smile in the cor­ners of her mouth that tell me I have more than gained her approval.

And as much as it tick­les my ego to a cer­tain extent, I still dont like it. Because that voice on my shoul­der is never fully my own.

Although in the end its a small price to pay to be free from the school sys­tem. Almost.