Twelve Feet, Six Continents, One Year

Our Christmas morning was not very much unlike any other year: stockings with gifts from Santa, a decorated tree surrounded by a pile of wrapped gifts from mom and dad, cinnamon rolls, all the excitement done by 8am... With a smile like this... This is what the sound of wrapped lego looks like Typical Christmas morning chaos Henry got some beyblades! Santa brought Ali (and Cate) a ribbon Santa brought stick on nails to Ali and Cate Happy! If you know Elise, you know this is a Christmas morning tradition Henry's new sunglasses (aviators!), combined with some found items, equals superhero! On the other hand, the rest of the day was quite out of our ordinary. First, we drove to the highly-recommended Cottesloe Beach. Because when else are we going to spend Christmas frolicking in the Indian Ocean? One observation I would like to make is that the demographics of Christmas beachgoers was far more diverse than what we have seen elsewhere in...

  Darkest before the dawn you say? Let’s take a look. A serene start to the day at the pond in our neighborhood park On the morning of Tuesday, December 24th, the need to prepare for Christmas was, you might say, quite urgent. We decided to divide and conquer so that Elise could head off and do as much shopping as possible, hopefully achieving what we couldn’t on the 23rd. I decided I would take the kids to our local library for our school day. A library is always a reliable source of happiness and I figured it would let me lead all four kids through school without strife. The local library branch is apparently closed for renovations and the pop-up library was wholly unsuitable for our needs. Luckily, we found a different library and Elise delivered us there on her way to shopping. This was better than we could ever have imagined. The Town of Cambridge’s library is modern, has excellent wifi (which is critical to some of our lessons), has a “social space” with ideal...

Monday, December 23rd was our first full day in Perth and we had high expectations. The day before, we had landed in the early afternoon, obtained our rental van, arrived at our house, shopped for groceries, eaten dinner and gone to bed mostly without incident. The house is exceptional, with plenty of sleeping space, a well equipped kitchen, excellent air conditioning and many terrific amenities for the kids. We woke up quite early (on account of a few hours westbound jet lag) with two main goals in mind: re-establish the school routine and do a massive amount of preparation for Christmas, which was only two days away. Leaving the kids with the house's gobs of toys and cable TV, Elise and I headed to a nearby Target, confident that we would enjoy the same one-stop shopping as we would at home. We didn't. This is a much smaller franchise that is fine for clothes but not for all the other things. For example, we planned to buy a digital camera to replace Lily's, which die...

Since most of our peers in the US are on winter vacation and marking the halfway point in the school year, let’s take a moment to make a close examination of our homeschooling effort to date. Part One: Fall Semester Timeline: In May, just a few weeks before we were set to leave, we had exactly zero idea how we were going to homeschool. We figured we had two months, July and August, in Minnesota to figure it out. Enter the Dustin of Destiny, husband of Lily’s softball coach and teacher at Summit Learning Charter, a mostly-online charter school based outside Portland. Truly, this was a miracle! Our enrollment with Summit gave us access to innumerable resources including living, breathing teachers and other education professionals. It also meant that because Summit receives our tax dollars that we receive a credit for buying curriculum materials through two catalogs. Lily, being a sixth grader, would have online classes that she didn’t have to do in real time, which was essential giv...

The first time we visited Sydney, it was for one night (and a total of about 12 hours). The third time will be three nights. The second time? You guessed it: two nights. In terms of play by play, we arrived by plane after a 90 minute flight from Gold Coast airport. The only notable thing about this has to do with time zones. Sydney is in New South Wales and Gold Coast (specifically Coolangatta) is in Queensland, which sits on top of NSW the way Washington sits on top of Oregon. Nevertheless, Queensland has its own time zone, one hour earlier than/behind NSW. Thus, we left Byron Bay at noon and arrived in Coolangatta an hour later at - drumroll, please - noon. After a bit of lunch by the beach we flew for 1.5 hours and landed 2.5 hours later in Sydney. It's hard to say whether or not we had jet lag but we were definitely confused. (I hadn't realized we jumped a time zone when we drove 2 hours from Brisbane to Byron a few days earlier.) NB: Screen shot taken at 12:44 with ...