Precious Moments

This week was our week off.  I had great plans to catch up on all my blog reading, write a few posts, school plan and rest some, maybe even slipping in a bit of book writing at the same time.  I was so busy I did absolutely none of the above.  Nada.  Sigh.  We did have a blast though.  Here is a peek into my week:

Project Based Learning

Friday’s project based learning for the older girls and their friend K12 is creating curriculum for the little children (post to come at some point) based around the fairy tales of the Grimm brothers and Hans Christian Anderson.  Here they are filming their first installment of Cinderella with K12 as Cinderella and my girls as the ugly sisters:

K made the dress she is wearing, the apron and also the broom!  How clever is she?

Valentine Day

Well I never thought I would be helping any 13 year old daughter of mine celebrate Valentine’s day and yet that is exactly what we were all doing on Sunday!  L13 and one of her very best friends B14 shared their feelings about each other in the new year.  The two families got together and discussed how we wanted to proceed.  L and B have known each other for a few years and liked each other for almost the same number of years.  They have both been incredibly sensible about their relationship and have agreed to take it very slowly and allow their friendship to develop in a group situation, without any dating as such.  We think the world of B (which is the only reason we would even contemplate this at such a young age) and they are very cute together.  I know a few of you have asked me about how we will be handling dating and the like.  I might very well write a post about it soon.

K (his sister) and C decided they would like to organise a Valentine’s dinner for B and L so we decided we would all get together Sunday lunch.  K cooked the most delicious spaghetti bolognaise with garlic dough balls and salad:

Much thought was put into gifts by both L and B with B writing down 100 reasons he liked L and L gifting him with a beautiful framed picture of the two of them.  They both hand made their cards.  I did get permission to post about this 🙂

Lorna and I read through his one hundred reasons and both of us had tears rolling down our cheeks.  It was so lovely.  Their reactions to each others presents was very cute as well:

How happy does my girl look?

B also bought L twelve beautiful red roses….

Gary and I found it hard to have our Valentine amidst all the teenage angst which accompanied the days running up to Sunday.  That said he bought me a beautiful bunch of flowers, wrote me a very special love letter which brought tears to my eyes and he paid off the remaining month of my phone contract and arranged a new one with a new phone (my old phone had gone into emergency mode and refused to turn on sometime over Christmas so I’d been without a phone for a few weeks).  My favourite?  The letter of course 😉

I felt very spoilt.  I am so in love with my husband <3

Out in the Garden

On Monday we continued to dig the area where the ‘teen nook’ is going:

The huge compost pile is being moved to the side of the garden, where I think the plans is to make a flower bed to edge the pathway which will go up to the shed and the nook:

A loves being outside with her Daddy and is a very enthusiastic worker:

One of our two sheds has to go to make room for the nook so Gary emptied it and reorganised things to fit into the bigger shed:

Birthday Girl

On Wednesday B4 turned into B5.  She requested a flower fairy party which I happily provided, with balloons and candy floss.  She was very specific 🙂  I succeeded on the balloon front and failed miserably with the candy floss.

She got lots of fairy themed presents with her musical jewellery box being her favourite by far:

I made both girls their dresses working until late, late, late the night before, desperately trying to get the straps finished in time.  Don’t they look cute (my girls not their dresses):

Ahhh…

We had invited their favourite two friends to the fairy party, which we had at lunch time:

That evening we had a second ‘party’ with pizza take out with Nik, Lorna and their respective families.  After T’s very special birthday when we all prayed for him for the coming year, our three families had agreed that we would do something similar for each and every child:

Thursday we spent with friends and Friday we had a funeral to attend.  Gary ended up going with my mum (it was one of mum’s friends, who Gary had worked for) as none of the children wanted to go.  It would have been their first funeral and we gave them the choice of whether they wanted to go or not.

For our week off, it sure was busy.  I have done absolutely no school planning, no resting and feel like a weird, overlysocialised homeschooler!  A happy one, but I sure could do with a week off to recover from my week off!