I have been tagged by my friend Jenn Everybody else has been writing 10 random facts but Jenn decided that we needed a bigger challenge! So here goes.

12 Random Facts indeed. I tagg my friends Alison , Taffy and Centralian Jen

Announcing another Loveliness Fair by the ladies at 4Real Learning! This Fair, The Loveliness of Homemade Gifts is hosted by

Dawn at ‘Sun and Candlelight’

Driving in the rain today I passed a group of boys playing an impromptu game of footy on the hockey fields. They were plastered with mud, the field was a mess and the boys were obviously enjoying themselves. I reflected that it has been a long time since I have seen boys out just having fun, even in this country town. We perceive the world to be an unsafe place for children, and often with just cause. We protect our children shuttling them from school to activites to home. Our parks are very tame children no longer have the thrill of a merry go- round ride or an exhilarating race down the slide. Very rarely are children seen out riding their bikes down the streets or just out exploring. Our children have missed out on many of the simple pleasures of life.

It was good to see the boys in the mud and the rain a reminder that not all the simple things in life are lost.

Our offer has been accepted!! We are officially going to be property owners, all going well we will be in by the 14th of December, just in time to celebrate the birth of Christ in our new home.

I haven’t taken it in really. 140 acres for the children to explore and run free. It will be wonderful.

So many things to do, when I stop to look at the list I am daunted, not only do we have to move nine people and eleven years of accumulation we also have to have this house looking immaculate for inspections.

After listening to two boys argue for two hours over who was responsible for cleaning up their room, and then neither doing it I knew I could not go through this every time the agent brings over a prospective buyer. I have packed up their rooms. By this I mean everything has gone into storage, all their books, toys, games and the majority of their clothes. I left out five outfits and a church outfit, that’s it. Now all they have to do is make their beds.

Afterall when we move into our little cabin they won’t have room for much more anyhow. I call it a cabin because our new home is not really much bigger than one. It reminds me of the cabin we stay in during our yearly homeschool camp. It will be about two years before we can extend in the meantime we shall learn to be very tolerant of one another. It was only four years ago that we lived in a similar cabin. Only this time we will be ‘among the gums.’

Today as I sat at the pool with dd5 waiting for her siblings to finish swimming training I made an interesting discovery. I can’t narrate very well. Here I am expecting great feats from my dc and I can’t achieve this excercise myself.

I was trying to distracte dd who was cold and wet and wanted to go home NOW. As I didn’t have any books to read with me I decided to tell her stories. Somehow I managed to stumble through David and Goliath, however I did have to keep going back adding in the bits I forgot. After stumbling through an imperfect rendition of the Gingerbread Man I came home tonight to ’study up’. Tonight we read Snow White. I’ll do better next time (I hope)

Narrating is a very difficult task, telling a story is certainly a different art then reading. Many cultures hand stories down from generation to generation. It is an important and talented skill. Certainly one that I don’t have.

For the past few days I have been engrossed in the world and words of Tom Dooley, an American Naval Doctor who gave medical aid to 600,000 Vietnamese refugees in their flee from the Viet Minh in the 1950s. Later Tom dooley set up Medico. ‘Deliver us from Evil’ has really made me stop and think, about the selflessness of Doctors and medical staff in refugee camps.

Most of all I have become fascinated by the Vietnamese people and their history. Their tenacity to hold onto their Faith is astounding, the Communists cruelly tortured these people for holding true to the Catholic Faith. 150,000 of Vietnamese’s 200,000 Catholics lived in North Vietnam. Deliver us from Evil describes the rush of the Vietnamese to escape from the North to the South before the Bamboo curtain closed. Under the Geneva Treaty they were to be allowed to go South if they wished, in reality many never made it.

I wish to share a passage that brought tears to my eyes. This paragraph describes the rescue in the final leg of an incredibly heroic escape of 1100 people who had lashed together 14 sampans and braved the open sea for five days and nights. Travelling 300 km by sea. Their skin was cracked and dry, they were absolutely miserable and yet…

“When our LSM was close enough for the refugees to make out the French flag on our stern, a heart-warming thing happened. Recognizing us as friends and not as foes, they hoisted, on a broken spar their own drenched flag: a flag they had hidden for years…their symbol,their emblem, their heraldry.

To the top of their highest mast they hauled the Papal banner, a yellow and gold flag displaying the Pope’s tiara and the keys of Saint Peter.”

Term 4 has begun. Slowly we are getting back into the flow of another school term. This last part of the year I am determined to ensure that we revisit the poets. Every day for half an hour after our morning tea break we sit down with old friends and new. Today we all enjoyed revisiting Mr Nobody and other favourites. Then we enacted out with great flourish ‘Said the Spider to the Fly’ the children are considering presenting this one at our annual homeschool concert in a few weeks. When we turned the page to “Oh Captain My Captain’ Anna Maria jumped up, grabbed the book and read it too us. There is just something about poetry that speaks to the soul, the richness of the words, the meaning behind, the familiarity of the old and the freshness of the new. This quarter we are also reading though an anthology of Catholic poets. Yesterday as we read about the Holy Babe Francis was inspired to write his own poem about the Christ Child which he scribbled down as we read.

His eyes are the Stars
His Face is the Cloud
Space that stretches on and on is His Cloak
His fingers are the Planets
His beaming smile is lit from the Sun.

For so long our dream has been to have a property, to raise our children where they can have freedom to roam and explore. Finally after searching for 18 long months we have found ‘it’. Land, lots of land, 140 acres of land. Here I can visualize the children building cubbies in the bush, climbing trees, walking the creek bed, swimming in the dam, camping out. They will have room to kick their soccer ball without the fear of being hit by passing cars. They will be able to ride their bikes on trails through the bush.

Please pray as we begin our negotiations with the owner.

Dear Family and Friends,

We have created this blogspot with the desire to share some of our daily life with you.  We are separated by many miles but it is our hope that with this online journal we may feel a little closer.  Through these posts you will catch glimpses of living life in a Catholic homeschooling family of nine.