AJ's lookout

AJ has been a little monkey lately climbing up and down the clothesline. He loves just standing on top of it looking out across the garden.

The children and I were walking yesterday morning and we stopped to chat to an older gentleman who was outside doing some yard work. He asked the children how they were enjoying the school holidays and AJ said "we don't go to school - we homeschool". The man was surprised and said "I was too!". He lived on a cattle property about 150 miles from the nearest town and so he did correspondence school up until 4th grade. He stopped school in 1945 when he was 12 to work on the property which he then did for another 8 years before his father, at age 86, decided to retire and sell the property and share some of the money from that to help his children. The man we spoke to bought a big truck which he then drove for 43 years, before he retired. A very interesting character and my children and I were fascinated by his stories.

This morning we all went for a bike ride around the creek and out to the beach again. When we did that several days ago, the tide was up all the way to the top of the beach - the biggest king tides in a decade apparently. This morning we timed our ride when the tide was lower. On the way back, we stopped near the edge of the creek to have a drink break and AJ decided to check the temperature of the water. Within a minute, all the kids were swimming in the water and I was half way wet. Our sub-tropical waters are looking so beautiful and inviting lately, I couldn't stay out. It's our little piece of paradise.

After coming home for breakfast, the kids and I went to the library, got a few groceries and then went home for lunch. Summer spent the afternoon at her friends place playing games while Nicholas napped. I gave AJ a haircut and tended to the garden a bit.

Summer and AJ are interested in starting their own blogs and doing more online so, as we only have internet on one computer, I'm going to cut myself back a bit on the time I spend here. Maybe 5 hours a week maximum. I tend to spend too much time on here reading about all the things I want to do that then I don't end up actually doing many of them. Well, it's time to actually build the solar oven, and do more basic stuff in the kitchen and sort through some of the piles around here (mainly paperwork and articles I've collected or printed off the net and haven't gotten around to reading yet) and work on the specifics that we want on the farm - like the type of buildings. Summer has been building her 'dream home' in the sand when we go to the beach. It looks like a cob house with enormous vege gardens radiating out from it, a waterfall and a two section pond with a dam in the middle. After she'd done this several times, I told her I'd been thinking for a while that when we get our land, she and the boys can each design their own pod and oversee the building of it. We got a pile of books from the library today on different earth-friendly building techniques so we all can start looking into that again.

I'm not going to think about trying to build a web site at the moment, I need to focus on other areas. I just want to spend less time in front of a screen, and more time just living life. So I'll still post on here, check my friends blogs, email, put a few things on ebay, do a little research from time to time and then I'm out. Like right now, time to read another Magic Tree House book with the boys. Ciao!