Today we ditched school – completely. 

And it was wonderful!  It felt like a mid-week holiday.

It began with a wild, noisy, exciting and completely exhilarating homeschool playdate with loads of homeschooling families I’ve never met before!  Lulu, a homeschooling mom with three kiddies, organised this event and put on a spread of note.  Look at this table of food.

I mean LOOK at this food… yum yum! …all the sweets one could want…

and healthy stuff too.  Mmmm-mmm!

We met at Kids Planet in Muizenberg.  It’s a converted hall that has all sorts of fun things to play on for the kids, plus an outside area.   My girls spent a fair whack of their time on the foefie slides.  In fact, they spent their entire time playing, playing, playing and making new friends.  I only saw them if they needed a lift up onto something or they couldn’t find their water bottle.  The kids were teaming everywhere – all 45 of them

Which meant that I was free to chat!  As others were too – lots of great mommy chats; info swapping; story swapping; idea swapping and more

By the end of it, I was pumped from all the energy of meeting new people and having great conversations.  I think that puts me in the category of extravert, even though I’m also a complete homebody – how does that work, exactly?

We left in time to head home for lunch, but thanks to Lulu’s great catering skills, my kids were propvol and didn’t need much lunch at all.  I did manage to get them to chomp on some carrots, tomatoes and cold meat before we headed out for our next adventure of the day…

Kirstenbosch. 

We almost didn’t go.  I felt somewhat guilty about the no schoolwork day and thought perhaps we should do some school in the afternoon.  Which is really dumb, because we didn’t have much to do thanks to some creative reorganising of our schedule this week.  So, while we were having our midweek holiday, I thought, we may as well HAVE our midweek holiday!  Which is exactly what we did.

We joined up with Caren, her boys and Tegan.  Sue was supposed to come too, but Caleb had an impromptu doc visit thanks to a smashed head at playschool.  Ouch!  A stitch fixed him up, but I can bet Sue’s nerves took a while longer to settle! 

So, while Caren and I enjoyed the shade and a chat, the kids enjoyed the river, each other and catching tadpoles!  Once Joel realised that the river actually did have tadpoles, he was on a mission to find every representative of the frog’s life cycle – and he succeeded!

This was his first discovery – a baby, but authentic, legless froggy!

At one point all the kids were searching for tadpoles…

and everyone wanted to see what Joel had caught…

Here is the little dude…

After that Caren was required to photograph every little guy that Joel found – a wonderful biology lesson for the day

And, when tadpoles got boring, these two little cherubs hung around mom, played in the water and oozed cuteness

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It was a lovely afternoon, despite minor disobedience from my monkeys and Kiera wailing that Tegan didn’t want to play with her (aka Kiera wanted Tegan to do what Kiera wanted to do and couldn’t cope with the fact that Tegan was quite happy looking for tadpoles with Joel)  We had a long chat about it in the car – boiling down to what she could’ve done about it.  We established that she had had three choices 1)wail, cry, whine, nag etc or 2) go play with the other kids and cut her losses for the day or 3) join in with the tadpole hunting for the sake of hanging out with her friend.  Hopefully next time she will choose 3) or 2) instead of the #1) she chose today!  Well, at least she aims to try – and the aim is heartfelt. 

So who said that school wasn’t actually accomplished, today?  We covered loads of school-worthy subjects such as …

• Physical Education
• Socialisation (yip, even us homeschoolers )
• Biology
• Life Skills

I’d say we had our cake AND ate it