Bonfire

Winter time: The time of cold, the time of no swimming, the time of shorter days and the time of.......FIRES! BURNING OFF! BONFIRES AND IN GENERAL PYROMANIAC ACTS!!! BOOYEAHHHH!!! LOVE IT!!!!

Last night my family lit our bonfire located next to our house (ok so you have got to wonder about the wisdom of it's location....yeah i picked it ;) ) the timber and other flammable materials were very well dried out due to our lack of rain in the past month or two, it made for a very hot fire.

                                 
                                   
                                   You know it's an awesome bonfire when your roosters start crowing thinking it's daylight!!



Of course the best thing about bonfire's is the marshmallows! :D yum yum.   

                                           
Just like to add I think I am improving as I have posted again before my usually 7 month period, it only took me 2 months!! ;)
                 

Blade Boards

After two of my siblings birthdays we now hold two blade boards in the house. Having no concrete to ride on, means we ride them up and down the hallway with turning points at each end.

The Great Hall is one of the turning points. Being such a large space we thought, 'why not do more with it'? So that's what we did. My younger brother climbed up into the rafters and tied a rope so that it was dangling down to about his chest height. We used the rope to spin around the Great Hall and used the momentum to propel us back down the hallway, or to just keep spinning faster, and faster, until we were too dizzy to continue.

My younger sister invented the method of yelling KARKAR! (same noise as in robots for their alert word) as we shoot back down the hallway, this was to avoid fatalities.

(the rope is a bit hard to see)

Today I came up with a fun but dangerous game 'blade board jousting'. I made two jousting poles by attaching padded boxing gloves onto the end of two straight short solid poles, next I duct taped towels along the whole length, so not a bit of wood would be left unprotected to inflict injures.

After making a couple of makeshift cardboard shields, we were ready to joust.

The objective: knock your opponent off their blade board.

Gathering a big run up from either end of the house we charged!

Pizza

Being on a grain free diet makes it difficult to find recipes for pizza, the few recipes I have found, haven't always turned out, so I created my own.

I modified a pancake recipe drastically, then I fried three of my modified pancakes on my crepe maker, smeared BBQ sauce on each one, before stacking them on top of each other, with cheese in between one of the layers as well, making a triple decked pizza.

Now comes the topping:

cabanossi, salami, bacon, (I am most defiantly not a vegetarian) Pineapple, a little bit of capsicum and finally I finished it off with I heavy sprinkle of cheese.

The triple decked layers and texture of the pancakes caused the ending result to be a wonderful fat, spongy, pizza.

My Sister's Birthday

Saturday was the day of my little sister's 10th birthday and birthday party.

After a early wake up call to open presents, we started the preparations for the oncoming party.

at 1:30PM the guests started to arrive, their cars quickly filling up our yard.

Then the party games were quickly underway, as all the children were eager to begin.

I was in charge of all the music for the games.

After a treasure hunt that lead them all back inside for party food, my sister opened her presents from her guest's.

Then people started to leave in fear of an incoming storm, which had been brewing all day.

Hope you had a great day M....., we all love you very much.

Camp & Friends

Over the past couple of weeks we have been quite busy. We went to our annual Catholic Homeschool camp, then our camp friends from South Australia, came back to stay at our place for another wonderful week.

Tuesday

At camp my young brother and sister made their Confirmation and first Holy Communion, with the Bishop.

I joined in the choir for the first time, It's going to take me a long time to be able to sing in Latin.

Wednesday

We had a big dance night Wednesday night, first time boys have actually attended.

I learnt swing dancing, thanks to a wonderful teacher, Elyse B (shes the girl I'm dancing with in the first photo below)



















Thursday

Thursday morning was the day of the sports day, which for me involved getting up early to help set up, then participating in sports till lunch time.


(I'm the one in the blue shirt)

Thursday night was the concert night I was MC this year, which meant I had permission to tell lame jokes, much to the delight of the audience :)

I won the camp trophy for Best & Fairest.

After the concert all the teens went down to the bonfire on the beach.

After the bonfire the annual staying up all night for the teens commenced, sadly for the first time, I was unable to attend I had to go to bed at 3:00Am because I had my soccer grand finals the next day.



(At the beginning of the night)










(Near the end)

Some of the things we do on the all nighter is pig out on junk food. We also do shots with fizzy drink (fizzy drinking competition), just what every parent wants their good Catholic teens to do. I just lost the contest coming seconded by a second or two, which meant losing my title from the previous year.










Friday morning we packed up and left, only to find that half the camp had come home with us. Three camp families had come to our place for lunch and to see our extensions we have been working on for the house.

Over the next week we had the M family (our friends from South Australia) stay with us. along with another local family from camp coming around most nights for tea, meant 27 people at the tables.

The first Friday they all came to my soccer game to be my cheer squad with two other local families there supporting me, I had a total of 36 people cheering me on. They took up a whole stand. With support like that you would expect my team to win, but sadly we lost 7-0, yeah we got flattened :).

That night we all caught an awfull vomiting bug, it must have been a wonderful holiday for our friends (I will not be showing you any pictures of it!). after one day, almost everyone was better and we were able to go back to having fun.



We all immensely enjoyed riding the dune buggy around the paddocks.

Some of our guest's I instructed in driving the buggy, about 4-5 people were taught by me (and no they didn't crash it).












There were also big games of Halo multiplayer between our two families

After a week of fun, we enjoyed a movie night on the last night before the Ms left for the long trip home.

Writing Club

a year ago my family, friends and I started a home-schooling writing club, with the aim to further improve our writing skills.

Three school terms ago our parent decided that us older kids couldn't learn much more from them, they started looking for some one else to teach us. Mum finally found a kind nun who use to be an English teacher willing to teach us.

Since then we have been doing writing club each Wednesday at the convent with two of our friends, while our younger brothers and sisters along with their friends have been doing it at home.

We have learnt much from Sister, especially on essays.

One Year Adventure Novel

For school this term, mum did some searching for a good writing curriculum. She came across one called One Year Adventure Novel and I'm loving it.

It's very good for creating a good story structure and helping you give your story a meaning and a goal, it also helps you to develop good characters for your story.

It's down side is it doesn't really help you in descriptive words and sentences, I would suggest a lot of quality reading if you want help in that area.

It comes with two work books and eight DVD's, with enough lessons for two lessons a week for a year.

License

Exciting news !!!

Two weeks ago I got my L's, I passed the test getting 44/45 right.

Then I got to drive home, I was able to count it as night driving because it was dusk.

I've now got close to three hours of driving up. with more then half of it being night driving.

Holiday LAN Party

At the beginning of the Christmas holidays I thought it would be a great idea if I invited some friends over to have a big LAN party [multi-player].
So about two weeks later three of our friends came over with their computers and the games we wanted to play. Together with my brothers and my friends there were six of us.

The LAN party went for two days, from 9 A.M to 4:30 P.M the next day with a movie night in between, where we watched Iron Man 2 till 10. The most popular game played was Star Wars Battle Front 2 followed by Stronghold Legends. With only a couple of hiccups with the computers the LAN party was a big success, I hope we can do it again next holidays.

Legolas' Arrow Tips

Sorry everyone for not posting in seven months!! [bad, I know].

Highlights of my last seven months include...

1
My Mother is having a baby March 22nd.

2
My Father got a new job as an accountant at a local saw mill.

3
I've just done my Bronze [surf life saving course].

4
My whole family is on a strict diet.

5
In April I was invited to join A squad, and since then I have been swimming 3-4 times a week at 5:30 AM.

6
We have almost all our gyprock up in our extensions, and have began plastering, and painting.

Hopefully it won't be seven months before you hear from me again.

Eragon Character Quiz

I have recently done the Eragon character quiz, to see which character I most resemble. I most resemble Saphira.

Soccer Wall

For my 13th birthday last year my Dad started building me a wall to kick soccer balls against.










Everyone helped.












We finally finished 9 months later, almost at my next birthday.










I enjoy kicking the ball against the wall.

The Lord of the Rings - Game

My brothers and I decided to make a Lord of the Rings game; after two months of planning, drawing and cutting we finally finished it.







The cardboard counters you see each count as a unit, and on each counter is written the players defence and attack points.







The object of the game is to eliminate your opponent.




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All the units are based on characters from The Lord of the Rings movie or book.

Archery

My brother and I have two recurve bows we like shooting arrows at our target in the paddock.

My First Fish

The other day I went fishing and caught my first fish.
















It was hard to convince everyone that it would feed ten people.

Our Flying Fox

On our property we have a big dam. We have a canoe, a kayak and a tractor tube to muck around with. One of the best things we have is our flying fox. To make it we strung up a cable from one tree, to another, on the far side of the dam. For the pulley dad rearranged the front handle bars and wheel of a bike. You fly down the hill and drop into the middle of the dam. Dad also cemented car tyres into the wall of the dam to use as steps, to make it easier to get out where we drop.