Heaven Help Me!

The kids are very excited with the arrival of a new baby soon. They are having even more fun feeling my stomach and watching the roller coaster style waves.

Just about every day now they are excitedly asking me, “Is Thomas awake???” which basically means they want to get a kick out of him (ha-ha – no pun intended).

A funny conversation ensued after dinner tonight.

Catherine (spinning around with excitement): “Clare! Guess what?! Thomas was T-O-T-A-L-L-Y AWAKE today and Mommy let me feel her stomach! It was SO weird! Like tentacles inside or an alien raging around! Some other kind of being, but it’s a baby!!! Oh! I can’t wait!” (She uses her hands to demonstrate the alienness of the whole thing.)

She reminds me so much of this enthusiastic girl:   “:)”

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We have two birthday girls in our house this week. Teresa is now three and Gianna is now six! They were really excited to get their own cakes & cupcakes and pick out the special food and activities for the family to celebrate the day they were born.

As I told them, the day they were born was one of the happiest of my life! Thank God for my precious daughters.

Teresa (Look at that face! )

Gianna with the cake she made herself! (Well, sort of...)

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Can anyone out there  recommend a good megaphone? After about 5pm, my late thirty-something prego body is kaput, and the kids are totally taking advantage of this! It is much more effective for them to know that if there’s any goof-ball action, I’m going to get up, chase them, and catch them. But since there’s about five more months until I’m able to do that again without them totally laughing at me, I think I’ll have to settle for a megaphone.

(p.s. back in our days on the farm, I used to swing around 50 pound bales of hay and 45 pounds of grain until my due date! yikes! I was 25 then.  ;) )

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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)

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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!

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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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