Moving is always fun. February passed in a blur as we packed and cleaned and moved our household into the beautiful, two story 5 bedroom house we had found in Barrigada. Now a 10 minute drive to work, life was going to be much easier. And not a moment too soon as Stephanie was in full blown rehearsals for West Side Story with practices almost everyday.

A new house also meant new furniture so a cute little living room set was purchased from Designer's Direct. In hindsight we wish we had researched and tested our new couch set a little more as it turned out to be stuffed with foam chips and now that it's a year old, we have discovered it doesn't hold up well at all. I'm now on the lookout for an upholstery shop that could make new inside cushions for it, as it is a nice little set if it were only more comfortable to sit on!

Cassie adopted the single chair as her computer center, where she could multi-task watching her favorite TV shows while drawing on the computer.

Christmas 2011 found us living in the Inarjan house. A 45 minute drive from our office. Music production took place in our "library", the addition to the house.

Traditional Short Bread cookies were baked to give away to friends (or to eat ourselves)
And Christmas came and went like it does every year. It was a low key Christmas year. Cassie recieved a box of Trixie Belden books - a re-gifting of her sister's collection. Cassie proceeded to read through this series as fast as she could devour them. As they were my favorite books as a pre-teen, I was thrilled to introduce her to Trixie and her sleuthing skills.

Stephanie, in the meantime was busy in GATE theater rehearsals for West Side Story, where she had landed the role of Anybodys. Adam composed his music. Les wrote lyrics and practiced singing. And Eric worked on his computer skills, designing "skins" for minecraft and gaming levels for his own video games via Game Factory.

It has come to my attention that life has suddenly fast forwarded to mid way through 2013. Whatever happened to 2012? For that matter 2011 seems to be much of a blur as well. I guess we all have our seasons and I seem to have just passed through a non-writing season. I think I spent a lot of time watching TV shows online and reading what other people wrote.

It is important not to let our years fly by so fast without really keeping track of what transpired. So for the next while I'm going to attempt to recreate the lost year, documenting it as well as I can through pictures taken over that time. With commentary thrown in as I remember the events.

So let's begin....

It's been a long journey. One that started almost 8 years ago when we bought our second oldest son, Adam, his first electric guitar. Little did we know that we were enabling a creative musical genius to be born.

Over the years Adam has unschooled himself in playing guitar, piano, composing music, production and lyrics. He has several albums worth of music ready to be produced and shared with the world. In the process of allowing this to happen there were more people that needed to get involved. Since dad worked with musicians he tried to get various local musicians interested in Adam's music. Unfortunately we weren't able to find people who had the same enthusiasm and commitment to make sure the world heard the music. So that meant we were on our own. Something needed to be done.

Unschooling DAD in music! He had to learn to sing. Adding lyrics to Adam's songs was easy. Les has a gift for writing and putting that gift into writing lyrics was the easy part. Learning to sing the songs was the hard part. But finally the hard work has paid off and we are now ready to share the music with the world.

Adam's "band" is The Desolation Sound - named after a place near our hometown in BC, Canada. A place were Les spent many years working in the logging industry. There are other bands and even a production studio with this name or variations of the name. It is so hard to come up with something original. Like it says in Ecclesiastes, "there is nothing new under the sun".

But Adam's music is new. And different. And worth sharing. So for your musical pleasure here are various places you can find the music:

http://www.reverbnation.com/desolationsound

First of all, no we did not eat a whale.

However, a sperm whale washed up onto the reef line a few miles from where we live. I heard about it on the news and in typical unschooling fashion, decided to take my kids on an impromptu field trip to see this sight. The only directions I had for where to find the whale was on the beach near the Yona cemetery. Eric thought it was very fitting of the whale to die near a cemetery.

I parked as close to the beach as I could get and then Eric, Cassie and I hiked a short way to the water’s edge. Along the way, Cassie noticed pinecones on the ground and was surprised to see them. She remembers our conversations in Canada about the different kinds of trees that grow in different parts of the world. The pine cones she saw were tiny replicas of those seen in Canada, and came from the Ironwood trees that line the shoreline.

The kids were expecting to smell the whale long before we saw it as we discussed decay of animals. But all we could smell was the usual salty air of the ocean. No sign of a whale. Looking out towards the reef line, at least 1/2 mile away, I could see a rounded long brown “lump” that the waves were splashing over. I'm fairly certain that was the sperm whale reported in the news. Too far away to smell or to get a good look at.

Disappointed we returned to the cemetery where we wandered a bit looking at graves and reading inscriptions.  Then home we went, where we looked at various pictures of sperm whales (and others) online.

Later that night, another teachable moment ensued when Eric was trying his first hot banana pepper. He talked about enjoying hot things and the trick is to not let them touch his tongue. So then I asked the kids if they knew that certain parts of the tongue could taste different tastes.

“Oh, yes” Cassie exclaimed,” I read about it in a book.” Both her and Eric were able to tell me what parts of the tongue tasted sweet, salty and bitter. And then told me how they had both experimented with this to see if it was true. All without benefit of a science curriculum or lesson plan.