A very different week

Its been raining on and off since Sunday, mostly the soft drizzly rain that our British family and friends know so well. Sunday was hard! We were down at the stadium from just after breakfast, it was windy and cold and we chose to watch Ryan and Ethan’s games from the grandstand rather than the sidelines. By the time their games were done they were muddy and wet, from head to toe. Just before lunch we headed home and quickly changed into warm, dry clothes! Ryan is a real die-hard and asked that I take him back to watch the finals and see the prize giving – and I did. Dieter stayed home, holding the fort with Ethan, Jed and Aimee. The whole tournament experience was great and the boys loved it!

Since we never got a chance to rest over the weekend, we pretty much took Monday and Tuesday very slowly! It rained almost all day on Monday and I don’t think we ended up going to football in the afternoon, but we did spend the morning doing small tasks around town when we visited the library, home affairs (to eventually apply for Ethan and Aimee’s SA passports), the fruit/veg shop and material shop.

Slowly, slowly we have added Math and reading and other activities to our days since then. Ryan and Jed are cruising through percentages and converting decimal fractions into percentages. (Again I LOVE the way Singapore Maths makes all these things look so easy!) Ethan has finished numbers up to 30 and is now learning Time – today he whizzed through a whole handful of lessons which were a basic introduction to ordering the day. I’m reading ‘House of 60 Fathers’ to Ryan and Jed, another story set in rural China, and we’re loving it! Diet and I are reading lots of lovely, new stories to Ethan and Aimee that we found at the library, and we are particularly enjoying some Dr Seuss humour again!

The highlight of this week has been our visit to Red Barn free-range chicken farm this morning thanks to some of our new homeschooling friends. We were 5 moms with our children and it was a really enjoyable – and enlightening – experience! It was so picturesque on the farm between rolling hills and rivers at the bottom of the huge Outeniqua mountains! The couple who run the farm breed both broiler (to be eaten!) chickens and egg-laying chickens and also have a store on-site where they sell their chickens in amazingly convenient forms. She only has 3 ladies helping her, who work mostly by hand, but this crew know exactly what they’re doing. (This lady is also running programmes together with government initiatives to teach others to do the same, even if just for subsistence farming) I’m not sure what excited the children more: holding a week-old chick, being kissed by a horse, feeding the chickens (more like running after them!) or checking the little hen-houses for fresh eggs. I’ve never seen the workings of a free-range farm before, and it was a wonderful experience for our children too!

Today was also the last of our tri-weekly football practices. Ryan and Jed attend the practices, but in reality the arrangement affects all of us! I know I’m going to miss those afternoon chats and short walks with the other moms who have become very special to me and we’ll just have to make a plan to get together! But it is going to be so nice to just have a short break (only as long as the school holidays – 3 weeks)!