Kea's Dance on Ocean Health.....

Kea's been working on some amazing projects with the Dandelion Dance Company this year.  Last year they applied for a grant through the World Wildlife Fund to create a dance on Ocean Health, and they received some money to bring Kea's vision to life.  It's been so exciting to watch her come alive with this project, and I'm so curious to see the final product.  She did a lot of research beforehand, created a general vision, they came up with fun costumes, hired a videographer and booked a pool, and for the first time ever, tried out dancing completely underwater, and making a film underwater!!!!  There's fish, and oil, Mother Earth and a passionate teenager trying to create change and help save Mother Earth.  There's also a lot of plastic being thrown in the water, and the fish get tangled up in nets, plastic, oil, etc.  Just last week Kea met with Hannah and the film maker to look at the footage and edit the piece, and she was thrilled to discover that it all turned out better than she hoped!!!  She found a piece of music that she liked, and spent hours putting it all together.  So exciting:-)

This is the brilliant photographer, who almost drowned himself trying to get all the right shots, and was even kicked in the head when Kea did the dive in to Mother Earth - what a trooper:-)

Not shown above is the fact that World Wildlife Fund was also there to film to process, and to interview Kea.  She was soooooooooooo nervous, but blew them all away.  And although this was a great success for her, she did mention at the end that she didn't so much enjoy directing, it was hard for her not to be in there dancing as per her vision:-)  But I suspect it's all been a great learning process......I'll be sure to post a link once the video goes live on-line!!!!!

Halloween

This year, Halloween really seemed to bring home the fact that our kids are GROWING UP.  Wowsers.  First off, they grabbed their pumpkins one morning while Jamie and I were busy, and just started digging out the guts and carving their own drawings on them.  Ry did need some help from his dad in the end, but such a shift from years past, it was rather startling:-)

Ry went for a spiderman symbol, and we put a red bike light inside so it looked really cool.  Kea did a dementor from Harry Potter (of course!) and Tiegan went for the classic puking pumpkin....

For costumes, we created this stick man costume (she has tape on her mouth as Kea was helping her, and Tiegan was irritating her, so this was her solution!) which looked REALLY awesome in the dark. But at the last minute, she completely changed everything and went as a red witch.  This girl!!!!!

Kea went as Buffy the Vampire Slayer:-)

And Ry, a zombie (he loves it when Kea does his make-up:-) )

Speaking of growing up, this year all three kids made sleepover plans with their friends for Halloween!!!!  So, for the first year ever, we were alone on Halloween night.  The family Ry staying with DID invite us to join them for trick-or-treating - and for a moment we were tempted, as this felt like kind of a momentous occasion, but then we sat back and realized that we'd be okay not freezing our butts off, going door to door, while the kids ran off.  THEY were totally fine leaving us behind, and to be honest, so were we:-)  So instead, we stayed home and enjoyed 24 hours alone, trying out our new sauna instead!!!!

Which I *think* was worth it, in exchange for the extremely overtired, cranky, sugar crashing kids we got back the next day:-)  Ahhhhhh, Halloween.........

Autumn Shenanigans

The kids had a PA day off school during the last week of October, and since we had Cam and Keane for the day, we decided to have some fun with the pumpkins and the leaves.  I hadn't been super inspired to take photos that day, but then we were outside and the sun was streaming down and pretty much BEGGING me to run back and grab the camera.  Which I'm so glad of, but I always love having memories of these days - LOVE watching my kids growing up with their cousins like this:-)

Homeschooling 101

When Kea dropped out of high school half way through Grade Nine, it was the best decision ever for her.  She came alive again, her headaches disappeared, she wasn't breaking into tears anymore, and there was a return of her passion, her enthusiasm and her pure joy.  However, we were a bit concerned about how to help her through her high school years.  It's one thing to homeschool during the younger years, but there's a lot of responsibility to come with educating teens and setting them up for further education and/or setting off into the world.  And to be honest, I find it kind of daunting.  Well, that, and I'm a bit more selfish with my time these days......

When she first left school, we all agreed to set her up with correspondence courses from ILC so that she could keep up with her classmates, and have the option to slip back into school at any point.  And this *MAY* still happen, especially for Grade 12, but the longer she is out, the less appealing it is for all of us.  However, we're still determined to have her keep up with her courses, as it feels like that will give her more options (especially since at this point she really wants to go to university, in the sciences.....)

However, it turns out correspondence sucks.  And shockingly, 14-15 year olds aren't innately motivated to do things they don't want to do.  So the two correspondence courses have been draaaaaaggggggging along, every once in a while we'd nag or get frustrated and the progress of the course would just inch along.  And now we're into Grade 10, and the Grade 9 courses still have not been done.  So we've made some major changes to how we're tackling it this year.  At the very least, we're going to finish the courses we've started, so from 10-12 every day is school time.  Sometimes this goes over, but the goal is to be no Facebook, no music, no distractions, and focused attention on school work.  Then at the end of each week, Jamie meets to go over what she's been working on in math.  Science she finds fascinating, and has no problems getting 97% on her assignment all on her own, but math is a slog.  I SO wish there was a program that could make math fun and engaging and exciting, instead of this boring on-line course......but until we find that, we slog on.

I feel like it's a fine line, I really enjoy everything that Kea is doing these days - she is absolutely thriving in her first job at the library, and in dance, she's reading fascinating books and challenging herself to try different genres, she's working to create a play with friends, and draws amazing pictures all the time.  I don't want to diminish the importance of all of this, nor do I want to take away her creative time.  However,  I do hope to teach her some new skills in how to get things done especially when you don't really want to.  I'm not sure we're going to use correspondence for the rest of high school (I get a headache just thinking of that!), but I'm hopeful that we're going to finish off these courses before the new year:-)

Thank goodness for Jamie, and his (for the most part) patience (and for her most-the-time patience right back!)