Miss almost-1 has a mild cold, which appears to be the inevitable consequence of a visit to the indoor disease vector play centre. Still, when I was sitting there the other day watching her play, neck-deep in germs plastic balls, I was thinking about how many childhood infections she *isn't* being exposed to, courtesy of the public education system and Big Sister. Even Ms 8, by this age, was mingling with other little plague carriers kids and their germs at creche.

Our washing machine is highly unwell - probably the pump. We can't get anyone to look at it til next week, so I'll be spending at least part of the weekend lugging buckets of dirty nappies to my ILs' house, the next suburb over. Still, at least I can go to my ILs', where I can drop them off and come back when they've finished, instead of having to hang out in a laundromat for several hours to get them done. It means I can come back and clean the house while I'm waiting (Oh, lucky me).

Ms 8 and her grandmother have gone to the circus. We originally had tickets for last Saturday's show, which was cancelled, but fortunately everyone involved was able to make the new time. My mother and father have finally joined us all in the late 20th century, with their acquisition of mobile phones (something they said they'd never do). Unfortunately, the phones still aren't of any use in contacting them, due to the fact that my father left his at home, and my mother discovered that the instruction manual to hers is the size of a small encyclopedia but contains very little useful information, such as, say, how to turn it off when you are going to a live performance (and no, there isn't a button marked "Off"). In the process of trying to find out, she forgot her PIN and the phone now needs to be reset before she can log back into it. In any case, Ms 8 being away means that I have been tidying up in her space, and have come up with Plans (yet more Plans) for simplifying and streamlining her stuff. The Beloved thinks my idea would work, now to run it past Ms 8 when she gets home.

I have just gotten home myself from picking up a big collection of plant pots, seeds, potting mix, watering cans and other gardening paraphernalia which I scored for Ms 8 on Freecycle. She has really gotten into gardening in the last six months, and has used pretty much everything which I gave her for Christmas. So she was thrilled to get a big pile of new seeds, in particular - her snapdragon seedlings mysteriously disappeared into the chaos on our back deck, but now she has two more packets to plant. Freecycle is such a fantastic resource for unschoolers!

Ms 8 has just been rediscovering an important principle of evolution with regard to dragonfly nymphs: survival of the fattest *g* She collected a dozen or so nymphs from the backyard the other day and put them in one of our observation tanks. Since then, they have been steadily disappearing, until this morning there was only one left. Now she's out collecting more victims for this tiny cannibal.

Thanks to the marvels of television (specifically, Life in the Undergrowth, presented by the amazing Sir David Attenborough) she was able to identify the ugly little things almost instantly, plus she knew what they ate. We couldn't remember if dragonflies live for years as nymphs, but thanks to Google we were able to confirm this. Since the one we have is still very small and can't be more than a couple of weeks old, I guess we probably won't be able to keep it long enough to watch its metamorphosis. But, since Ms 8 "farms" mosquito larvae for her fish, we can try to keep it alive for a while, at any rate. I was interested to read that dragonfly nymphs are also one of the predators of cane toads (in their tadpole state, of course). What useful creatures!

We've been seeing a lot of dragonflies about recently, and imagining what it would be like to co-exist with the huge prehistoric ones with wings which were each as long as a ruler...

Ms 8 finally has her betta (Siamese Fighting Fish), after a few days' delay. We went to the pet shop last week, but the woman we spoke to advised us that we hadn't had our aquarium prepared for long enough, and it really needed to sit for longer before it would be healthy for the fish. So Ms 8 twiddled her thumbs impatiently for an extra five days, which incidentally also gave her the opportunity to save more money and give herself the option of choosing between the expensive Crowns and Deltas and the less expensive, "no-frills" (pardon the pun) kind. In the end, she fell in love with the colours of one of the less-expensive ones, so she had more money to put towards buying dog toys for the dog's "birthday" next weekend.

In the process, we've had an interesting discussion about percentages. We have a VIP customer keyring token which give us 10% off all our purchases at our favourite pet shop, and during our visit last week, they gave us another one. Since then we've spent a long time exploring how percentages work. As ever, Ms 8 is very creative when it comes to finding ways to maximise her money...but alas, this time her schemes came to naught. For example, even if we use both our tags on the one purchase, we don't end up getting 20% off, and if we split the purchase between the two of us and each use one tag, we don't get any more off either *g* But we've also worked out what 10% of various amounts is, and I've explained the process of moving the decimal place. We sat down and calculated how much she could actually buy for the money she had if we factored in the discount beforehand. She was quite pleased to discover that it added up to a whole smoked pig's ear for the dog *g*

Having her own money to spend and plan for has been the major way Ms 8 has learnt about addition and subtraction, and she's beginning to explore multiplication and division as well. Now I can add percentages to the list of skills which she is acquiring through having a real, day-to-day reason to put them to use. Instead of using paper maths to arrive at a real, ingrained understanding of mathematical concepts (if she ever did - I didn't really get to that point in my own school career), she is acquiring the concepts first, and whenever she needs to, she will easily acquire the skills to translate that into writing.

Never really having done the public blog thang, I've never been tagged before. But now I have, by Miranda. So here are my answers:

The Four Things Meme

Four Jobs You Have Held

1. I did an Office Traineeship when I left school and didn't know what to do with myself (I failed filing and telephone skills. Woe.)

2. Lots of dull administration positions while I decided that what I wanted to do with myself was go to Uni.

3. Tutoring for my Honours supervisor in an undergrad course he was offering which was in my area of interest - this is actually very unusual in Australia (he's a transplanted American - maybe it's more usual there?) and he got a bit of flak for getting a lowly undergrad to tutor other lowly undergrads. I quit Honours halfway through, but the tutoring was fun.

4. Unschooling mother, when I decided that really uni wasn't what I wanted to do with my life after all...

Four Movies You Could Watch Over and Over

1. Pirates of the Caribbean

2. The Lord of the Rings trilogy

3. The Princess Bride

4. Monsters Inc.

Four Places You Have Been on Vacation

1. Adelaide (South Australia)

2. Wilson's Promontory, Victoria

3. United Kingdom (to visit relatives)

4. South Island, New Zealand.

Four Websites You Visit Daily

1. Always Unschooled and Shine with Unschooling e-lists.

2. The Sydney Morning Herald.

3. The Cellar's Image of the Day.

4. Blogs, blogs and more blogs.

Four of Your Favorite Foods

1. Apples.

2. Cheese (why I could never go back to being a vegan).

3. Chocolate.

4. Tofu (yes, seriously!).

Four Places You Would Rather Be Right Now

1. Dunedin, on the South Island of New Zealand. I fell in love with the city during our holimoon (holiday/honeymoon) in 2004, and would love to live there for a while.

2. Somewhere with maid service...

Other than that, I love this house and this city and can't really see myself anywhere else. I'm not really a rolling stone, I guess.

Four Cars You Have Owned

1. My very first car was a beaten-up two door Toyota Corolla, c. 1974, which my parents acquired for me just after I had Ms 8.

2. A Kermit-the-Frog-coloured Mazda 626, c. 1981, which was given to me by friends of my parents who had bought it very cheaply while they were here on sabbatical and decided it was too much hassle to sell when they went back to Japan. It later became piebald Kermit-and-silver after an accident, where I had to replace a door and front panel with bits from an old Mazda my brother used to own (we keep cars in the family).

3. A slightly newer, automatic, silver Mazda 626, which perhaps technically doesn't count as "owned" because it was on extended loan from more friends of my parents after the above car was stolen.

4. A white Toyota Camry, c. 1994, which we recently sold.

Four Bloggers You Are Tagging

I have to admit, I don't really have anyone to tag. This is a very new blog, and as far as I know nobody reads it. So, nothing to put here...

Edit: Blogger was being flaky when I tried to post this last night. At least this time it worked!

Ms 8 to Miss almost-1: "Ah, you daft halibut!"

*snorfle*

Last year, Ms 8 and I read a picture book from the library about "Snowflake" Bentley, a lovely, quirky book about a boy growing up in Vermont in the 1800s who was fascinated by snowflakes and became the first person to figure out how to photograph them. Well, courtesy yet again of the Cellar's Image of the Day, I found my way to the Earth Science Picture of the Day, and in browsing their archives, discovered the Bentley Collection held by the Schwerdtfeger Library. If you like snowflakes, this is a wonderful site. In hunting up the name of the picture book, I also found this site, which has a further digitised collection of Bentley images.

Ah, snow. Did I mention it was 35C here today? Snow has a definite appeal...

This was really not the best morning for Miss almost-1 to decide that 5:30 am was a fabulous time to start the day. Still less was it the best morning for me to discover that my coffeemaker had self-destructed overnight. And it was definitely not the best morning for my husband to be heading off for his first day at his new workplace, leaving me in sole charge of two children all day for the first time since the end of October last year.

On the other hand, it was quite a good morning for Miss almost-1 to decorate a nappy as a farewell present for her Daddy, rather than waiting til ten minutes after he'd left to go to work so I had to change her, as was her usual practice last year...

Ms 8 had another of her periodic fits of wanting to do school-at-home today, which I suspect will pass even faster than last time since she didn't even make it past the first hour before she had found something more interesting to do. This time I found her a blackline master map of Australia (courtesy of a link posted on the Australian unschoolers e-list a while ago which I bookmarked for future reference) and she added the names of the capitals. Then we brainstormed all the sorts of things she was interested in doing more of, while I took careful notes. The main interests she wants to follow up are geology and meteorology, so we hunted around in the bookshelves til we'd found all the resources I've collected on those subjects, and thought of different ways we could explore further. After that, she did a couple of pages in a maths workbook and a couple of pages in an English workbook, read through a short list of sight words, played at buying morning tea from the canteen, and then declared that one of the things you can buy from the canteen is an hour watching TV *chortle* She got me to set the timer for an hour, but before that was over Miss almost-1 had gone down for a nap and I started cutting out the pieces to make some new semi-fitted cloth nappies, so she joined me to make her own creative projects with the scraps. I will be surprised if "school" is resurrected tomorrow, although I'm now ready for her learning rhythms to start shifting into a higher gear. A good time to start planning some new things to do...