The Joys of Not Back to School

Well, school's been back in for a whole week now, and I'm more relieved than ever that my kids don't go to school. I could sense the anxiety building in many of the kids around here as the big day approached. It's almost spooky how empty the neighbourhood seems after having the streets filled with kids merrily playing all summer.

Ah well, at least our family is not a slave to the school system! Although we can't exactly ignore the fact that my kids' best friends are now in school all day, there is still plenty of fun to be had. The weather has been unseasonably cool and wet the last couple of weeks, but we had a couple of nice warm afternoons and headed out to the park one day and for a nature hike with the dog another day. The boys have been immersed in a Wallace and Grommet game (for Gamecube)they borrowed from their babysitter (an awesome young man named Dan - the kids love him so much they ask us to go out so he can come over!)

Let's see, what else have we been up to? Many of our days are so unstructured I have a hard time thinking about what we actually "do" all day.

Noah recently built and painted a model of an AT walker all by himself. Nathan build Jengo Fett's ship out of Lego (with a little help from his dad).






I've been busy "harvesting" our bounty in the garden, and starting to put the garden to bed for another year. I'm hoping to find some time to build a small cold frame and trying to extend our season by growing some greens in it.





Joe has been working hard at sprucing up the place. We have been redoing both the kitchen and bathroom (not a gut-everything-and-start-over, but painting, new mirrors/lights, that type of thing). Now we're looking at the rest of the house and realizing it needs a lot of help too. I got the itch to rearrange/spruce up the dining room (adding several furniture repainting projects, plus a sewing project and a lot of reorganizing/general cleaning out of stuff to the mix!)

We have a few outing planned for the upcoming weeks as well. The boys are headed to the Royal Botanical Gardens this afternoon for a homeschoolers' program on "Bugs". This program is running every other Tuesday afternoon until just before Christmas, and I think the boys are going to really enjoy it as they both love anything to do with "nature".

Other planned trips/outings for the near future: our homeschool group's "Not Back to School" picnic on Thursday, a visit to a donkey sanctuary, a visit to Dutchman's Gold (a local honey producer), and a trip or two to the Ontario Science Centre. We'll probably also hit some local farms for apple picking and other fall fun. This Saturday we are attending our CSA's end of season barbecue; this includes a tour of the farm so it should be really cool (although we've been members of this CSA for a few years, we've never managed to get to this event due to scheduling conflicts).

(Blogger is not being my friend right now - for some reason it is not uploading my photos. I somehow managed to get one in, but it doesn't like the rest! How annoying - I will give it a try later on.)