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Last week I saw a trade offered on our local "almost free" listings. I gave her this overgrown out of control rosemary plant (that I was planning to replace this year anyway).
And she gave me a practically new pair of size 2 Heelys (tennis shoes with built-in skates.)
Techically they are Sam's size, but Hallie's spent even more time trying them out. I'm certainly happy with the trade!
I was out in my front yard this afternoon, fighting with our manual push-mower (the gas mower won't start this year, haven't discovered why yet.) The back yard wasn't so difficult, since the hens help keep the grass low back there. But the front yard hadn't been touched yet this year and the grass was well over 12 inches in some places. I don't know how many people have experience with a manual mower, but they really don't grab and cut grass higher than about 4-5 inches... it just lays down. So you have to go over and over it, back and forth to get it cut. Does that adequately explain the fighting with the mower I mentioned in my first sentence? Can I also add that I was diagnosed with walking pneumonia on Saturday? I'm midway through a course of antibiotics, nasal spray and inhaler, but walking pneumonia isn't nearly as bad as I think it sounds. Just coughing and occasional wheezing and general aches and tiredness... which still sounds worse than it is. But I digress...
I was out in my front yard this afternoon, fighting with our mower, when a friend drove by on the way home from picking up some of her children from Japanese class. She promptly turned around, parked and got out of the van to offer me one of her sons to finish my mowing. (Sam had tried, but couldn't get the mower to move more than 3 inches.) So in exchange for feeding him dinner, I had a kind, helpful boy mowing my lawn, playing with my children, collecting worms for my chickens and pushing my baby in the swing. Truly, it was like a dream.
But it doesn't stop there. When I realized I had allowed my husband to head off to work in our only vehicle, on the night of a cub scout pack meeting, she had her husband swing by to pick up Sam and I for the meeting and drop off their three oldest girls to babysit the rest of my crew!
It's 9:00pm. My kids are all in bed. We had a successful pack meeting. My daughters had a great time with three terrific babysitters. My kitchen, livingroom and diningroom were swept by one of the babysitters, and another left me a fun surprise gift of handmade bookmarks. I dried 2 loads of laundry on the clothesline today. My lawn is mowed. I'm on the road to recovery. I am so truly blessed.
We started this little tradition a few years ago when the boys had their first father-son campout. The girls have an all-out tea party!
Hallie helped me make raspberry and blueberry mini muffins, then went to put on a fancy dress while I made heart-shaped cinnamon toast, sliced apples and tea to round out our breakfast tea. Even R got in on the party. She does love girly things.
The boys crashed the party by coming home earlier than expected, and made quick work of the remaining muffins.
Brian took Sam to the Cubscouts Camp-In at the Pacific Science Center last weekend. They had a great time doing candy chemistry, watching a laser show and sleeping in the Science Center. While getting ready for my evening (a meeting at our church), I came across Sam's packing list on the table...
Sam
Sleeping Bag
Pillow
Game Boy
Game Boy Games (Piglet's Big Game, Super Mario, Mario Pinball Land)
Brian said at one point during the night, he woke up to use the restroom, and Sam was missing. There was a no flashlight rule, so he used the light on the screen of his phone to search among over 500 people, trying to find Sam. He found him... he'd scooted down 10 feet or so, and was kicking Mr. Adams in the head! Here are a few photos from their adventure (taken on Brian's phone.)
A photo of the kids on Easter, and a recap. For the sake of the family yearbook.
We made resurrection cookies Saturday night, along with reading the story of Christ's crucifixion and resurrection, and then the shoes. Oh, the shoes. As we were (already getting to bed late and) laying out clothes for the morning, Hallie informed us that she didn't know where one of her church shoes was. We searched everywhere, and no shoe. So I had to go out at 10 at night to try to find a pair of shoes that she could wear on Easter. All I could find were sandals, which would have been fine since we needed a pair for Summer anyway. But when we woke up Sunday morning, it was pouring rain!
After church, we came home and fed Brian (he had to go to work that day), and gave the kids a snack. The trouble with mid-afternoon holiday meals with the family is that it just ends up being an EXTRA meal for the kids. I can't realistically expect them to go from 7AM until 2:30PM without eating, so I have to serve them lunch. Then they have the family meal, then I have to feed them a snack before bed, because once again, 2:30 until 8 the next morning is just too long to make them wait. The kids and I dropped Brian off at work, went to my grandma's for Easter "dinner", went back to pick him up for his dinner break (we're still a one car family for a while), fed the crew again, Brian headed back to work, I got the little ones ready for bed, and then collapsed on the couch with a Creme Egg. :)
(My grandparents hosted the family meal, but were only there for the very end - my grandpa had awakened in the middle of the night with severe pain, went to the ER, sat for 4 hours waiting to be seen, finally got escorted to a bed, and had to have surgery for a major kidney stone Easter morning! Certainly not the way they'd planned to spend the holiday, but we are thankful things went relatively smoothly and he was able to come home that same afternoon.)
Here are a few more experiments and projects we did during rainbow week.
We counted the number of each color of M&M's in a package (similar to the Skittles), but this time made pie graphs. To do this, we had to translate our findings into percentages. Sam was really getting the hang of translating a decimal to a percent by the end of the project.
We made a color wheel and showed how blending the colors makes white (or gray) appear, instead of the individual colors. The experiment originally called for sticking a pencil through it and spinning, but we couldn't get it going fast enough to work. Luckily, Sam had done a similar experiment while working with electronics, so he suggested getting out his snapcircuits kit. We stuck the wheel to to the top of the fan motor, and WHOOSH! It worked great.
We made more rainbows out of bubbles, and had a blast playing with rainbow glasses (they came with a science kit) and prisms.
Last Friday we finished up our rainbow study (other than assembling our lapbook, which we have yet to do), with a Rainbow Party.
We got together with a few friends and ate a variety of rainbow foods (Rainbow fruit salad, Rainbow chips and dips, colored caramel corn.)
We had rainbow crafts (painting, making tissue paper rainbows) set up inside for the younger crew.
And then we Tie-Dyed t-shirts!
Here's our finished products.
A blue dinner on Thursday:
Blueberry Oatmeal Pancakes (these were delicious!), Blueberry syrup, Blueberry pomagranate juice, and blue (dark purple) grapes.
A purple breakfast on Friday:
Blueberry Bagels, Mixed Berry Swirl Cream Cheese, (light) purple grapes, Cran-grape juice.
A rainbow hair adornment... (I picked up this hair beading kit for a dollar at Deals Only).
Lucky Charms (they have rainbow marshmallows, you know.)
A Rainbow Party (it was yesterday, but you'll have to wait for that post... I need one more photo when a project is complete.)
And we finished the day with a rainbow cake...
(It's "Funfetti", so there are colored polkadots on the inside, too). And before bed, a 4 player MarioKart race on the Wii... on what I consider the most difficult track: Rainbow Road.
A Yellow Lunch (Tuesday):
Soft Pretzel with Honey Mustard Dip, Egg Salad, Banana, Lemonade.
A Green Lunch (Wednesday):
Split Pea Soup, Quesadillas on Spinach Tortillas, Green Grapes, and a Key Lime Float. (Limeade mixed with sparkling water, topped with a scoop of vanilla ice cream.)
We're having such fun with our rainbow experiments. First we did an experiment about sunlight, putting a black piece of paper and a white piece in the sun for 20 minutes, and feeling them. The black piece was hot because black absorbs all the light (and therefore heat), rather than reflecting any of the waves back. The white reflects ALL of the waves back (all the colors together make up white light), and because it reflects the light rather than absorbing it, the white paper stayed cool.
This experiment used a few drops of each of the primary colors in milk, a drop of dish soap in the middle. We checked on the bowl every 15 minutes, and the kids made drawings of their observations at each checkpoint.
The kids loved playing with primary colored (transparent) paddles, combining them to see the secondary colors they made. They recorded their observations by drawing overlapping squares.
Squeezing a bit of mathematics into this week, we played with Skittles ("Taste a Rainbow!"). We opened our packs, made predictions about the color ratios, then counted each color and made bar graphs to visualize which had more. We did addition, subtraction, and averaging, to figure out how many we'd have to give or take to make us all have equal amounts of each color.
This has been a great tool for playing with color - the little wooden blocks are magnetic. Great for pictures, patterns, color combinations, etc.
And I'll end today's post with this fun display of sugar and artificial colors... but it was just too fun NOT to make. A Jello Rainbow.
Another sports event. Another opportunity to make fun themed man food.
Monday was opening day for the Seattle Mariners - my husband's favorite team. He took the day off of work, since to him, it's a national holiday!
Here's the spread this year: Philly Cheesesteaks, Foot-Long Hotdogs, Garlic Parmesan Fries, Soft Pretzels, Root Beer and Coke Zero.
And the snacks:
Peanuts, Licorice and Cracker Jack.
And after a thrilling victory for the M's... we put the kids to bed and had some delicious homemade mini-cheesecakes with blueberry compote. I made up the recipe for the compote after reading several online and none sounding quite right. I loved the one I came up with, so I'm posting the recipe below. Mmm...
Blueberry Compote
3 cups frozen (or fresh) blueberries
1/2 cup orange juice
2 Tbsp lemon juice
1/2 cup sugar
2 tsp cornstarch
Combine the juices, sugar and cornstarch in a saucepan over medium-high heat. When well combined, add 1/2 the blueberries (1 1/2 cups). Bring to a boil, stirring constantly. Reduce heat. Simmer 3-5 minutes, until thickened. Add remaining blueberries. Cook 1 minutes longer. Remove from heat. Chill if desired. (We used the remaining compote the next morning over a dutch puff.)
