Life with six kids, my soul-mate, a bunch of books, a cat & a dog.
I received a bad sunburn last Friday. Truth is, I was so busy putting it on the kids and taking care of them, I forgot myself! The good news is now that it is peeling, the kids have found a use for it: “Mommy! What a great way to see skin cells under a microscope!” I think this counts for our science requirement, don’t you? 
While many of us were still sleeping, or thinking about shoveling out of the foot of snow dumped on us over the past 24 hours, guess what? There was a 3.8 earthquake in Illinois! See here for more details. Did you feel it? Apparently, some did…
Let us renew our prayers for the efforts in Haiti.
It was a highly tactile day in our house!
This “Make Your Own Snowman” kit allows you to build snowmen and igloos indoors, when it’s too cold to play outside!
Four differently shaped (snowballs, snow cubes, snowman powder, snow base) polymers soaked overnight in H2O give the appearance and feel of
REAL ICE & SNOW! (Except not as cold.)
Would you believe it’s reusable? We’re going to dehydrate it, then “just add water” to use it again. (I’ll report back on how that worked out later.)
I’m hoping one of the kids will get psyched up to build a big snowman tomorrow, so I can post more pictures of it… I think today we were all just mesmerized by the texture of the stuff!
(p.s. It’s totally non-toxic and safe)
Some years ago, my husband was inspired by G.K. Chesterton’s metaphysical thriller The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare, to adopt a new code of names amongst our family members to settle our nightly chaos resulting from the ritual question “what should we do together as a family tonight?”. While our former system used to end in several children in tears or frustrated that no one ever wanted to do what they do, the new system solved the problem by assigning each person a “night” of the week (Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, etc. depending on the childrens’ birth order), in which the assigned child gets to pick the family activity which everyone participates in. The most popular choices are watching movies or playing video games, however, occasionally we do something different like we did tonight for “Tuesday’s” (Clare’s) night: Blue Light Chemiluminescence experiments.
A cheap kit purchased at our local American Science & Surplus shop (in addition, a good site to visit for some comic relief) provided hours of entertainment tonight. A little more advanced than our ordinary kitchen science (like Gianna’s adding vinegar to the juice remaining after boiling a head of red cabbage, producing a color chemical change: purple to blue), this kit used “real” chemistry to produce its results.
Do you know what you get by mixing Luminol, Perborate (Clorox 2) and Copper Sulfate? Lights off for a cool blue glow! This isn’t me – but this is what chemiluminescence looks like. The kids enjoyed the experiments and are glad they now know where “glow sticks” come from.
Hopefully, there’ll be more experiments to come!
The kids have been really excited to see all the BIG boxes arriving with the mail. Gianna (age 5) claimed this one for herself! On one morning, when she particularly didn’t feel like completing her schoolwork, I allowed her to do her work in this “big box”. As usual, she started the day by writing her name, then her numbers; today directly on the box. And when her mind wandered, she just started drawing pictures. I wonder if the local public school could provide each child with a box like this?! It did wonders for Gianna, who today especially needed her own little space to think and work.
Did you know that two phone books can adhere together as if cement were applied to each page?
This is what my children learned from Mythbusters’ September 10, 2008 episode, “Phone Book Friction”. If you interweave the pages of two phone books, they are impossible to pull apart, except with well, a tank, maybe!
They kids tried it out yesterday. At dinner, they tediously weaved each page on top of the next, the next on top of that, etc. until they replicated the original shown on Mythbusters.
The result: they pulled and they tugged; they fell on the floor from trying so hard to get it apart. The phone books would not release themselves from each other!
Here’s a couple pictures of them in action!
Eventually, they did get the two sides of the phone book apart – but it was because the covers ripped off – NOT because the pages slipped apart!
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