Short recap of the holidays, in no particular order as I am still a few weeks behind!
MUSEUM – Kids loved catching the train as always. At the museum we headed straight for the egg activities. There were no snake eggs – we asked. But there was lots of interesting stuff like lizard eggs, shark eggs and stick insect eggs. We played in the kids museum, the kids building with mini planks. Alex made a snake, Daniel just played around with them. There was a ‘make a nest’ activity. Alex made snake eggs. He came up with an interesting way of making the colour appear right – he painted the clay, then remoulded the clay to give this speckled effect. All the kids around us were painting beautiful bright easter eggs whilst Alex is trying to replicate nature. In the forest gallery we were looking at the male bowerbird for ages. They are beautiful! At home, Alex made a nest for Darcy, and pretended the eggs had started to hatch and turned the clay eggs into baby snakes! He painted them in retic colours. Vio was playing animal charades with Daniel, with Daniel just going through the pictures and naming all of the animals.
STATE ROSE GARDEN – our weekly homeschool meet was at the state rose garden. The kids climbed trees, pushed each other around in prams, collected petals to throw in the air and rolled down the hills.
PLAY DATES – we visited friends and went for a scooter ride where we saw two pairs of birds and guessed they were lorikeets or parrots (it turns out they were red rumped parrots), had lunch together and played. Alex was playing barbies with his friend.
ART – the kids have really got their art on over the holidays! The watercolours are a big hit, and Alex has remembered the wax first technique and used it.
GYMNASTICS – We went to an open gymnastics session with friends. the kids had loads fun. Then Alex did a skills session on flips nd saltos. He seemed to enjoy it. Afterwards we went to a park had a nice long play, mostly in the bushes! Daniel was very quiet and slept on my lap most of the time. As we got home, he developed a temperature and did a lot of sleeping but fortunately woke up good as new next morning. 
HOME – Kids wanted to go in the pool but it was dirty and filled with minibeasts. We thought they were mosquito larvae and looked them up. Alex was telling me about their lifecycle as there is an episode about them on wild Kratts. We transferred them to a bucket so that we could use the pool. As the kids played, I dug up the lettuces that had shot to seed. As I cut them up we looked at the liquid oozing out and saw that it was like blood in veins.
Alex has been watching youtube, especially searching for hot wheels layouts. He’s really keen for some and has drawn some of his own too. We have loads of cars, but no tracks. He’s also been playing the star wars game, watching videos of gamers playing GTA (we asked him to mute it because of the language).
I remembered the edison robot, and realised we hadn’t tried the obstacle detecting function. We made some wall using duplo and a bit of a maze but it was quite sensitive.
Alex relocated his feathers from the case to the walls of his cubby. He spent a few quiet hours doing it too!
SPORT – football and karate have more or less continued as normal. Alex has been getting up in time for football and getting ready himself.
SCAVENGER HUNT – We went to Brimbank National park for a record attempt at a scavenger hunt. The kids were excited and completed all of the clues. Alex didn’t want to stay and play and instead we went home, where he used a quill to paint a sulphur crested cockatoo. We tried the quill as it was, then cut the tip off and it worked much better.
OTHER – Daniel has been taking his arms out of the seat belt. Alex has gotten quite upset about it saying that he doesn’t want him to die and that he loves him more than all of his toys! He has helped Daniel get his arms back in when I haven’t been able to pull over immediately.
Of course there has been plenty of playground action too. Daniel has been into making campfires with lots of sticks and stones.
We saw a paw patrol live show and made some badges at the local shopping centre. Alex loved it and Alex really got into the dancing.
We went swimming at our local pool, we don’t normally go there and we probably won’t again as Daniel doesn’t like how deep it is.
QUESTIONS –
How is caramel made? Alex ate a caramello koala. So we melted some sugar, Alex helped but didn’t eat it. He seemed satisfied!
Why are plants green? I talked about chlorophyll and we watched a little youtube clip. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aAQYpra4aUs