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More fun with science

David is …well, fairly far behind in his cub scout work for this year.  I apparently haven’t had him doing enough stuff, or enough of the right stuff while Nick was gone, so now he’s playing catch-up.  So on Friday Nick took the big kids out and got them each a science kit (and a foam airplane for Greg so he wouldn’t feel left out).

David got a model kit to build the space shuttle.  That part didn’t actually take very long, nor was it very hard to do.  The hard part: instead of stickers for all the design stuff, they had teeny tiny tattoos that had to be cut out & applied with water.  Needless to say, I found most of them on the floor this morning.  Still, he designed a background for it to display against & it looks pretty cool.

Ben’s kit was more experimental.  He got one about light.  It contained around 25 items, including prisms, magnifying glasses, a small motor, lens making kit, reflective mylar, and instructions on how to make a box camera.  It was really cool.  We played with that all afternoon and parts of it came out during the rest of the weekend, too.

Greg has discovered the Paint app for the iPhone and he’s been making me lots of little pictures on it.

Actual kid conversation

I was on my way to the bathroom & overheard this conversation Nick was having with the kids:

Nick says something about his offspring.  David does not comply, when asked why, he says "I’m not an offspring."  Nick says "You are one of our kids, how can you not be our offspring?"  David says "Because I was not born in an off-spring month.  I was born in April."

Why does February always suck?

So hey, it’s February, and so therefore we have the Plague.  David has this on again off again stomach virus at least one day every week since the end of January.   Ben & Nick have been coughing, but seem okay for the most part. Greg has been snotty & feverish and coughing for a solid week now.  I got a sinus infection three weeks ago, spent two weeks literally writhing in pain before that started dying off, and am now living in the land of Am I Sick or Not?  (Which means one day of feeling good & productive followed by one day of deathly-sinus-headache followed by one day of chills/fever/but otherwise fine followed by one day of sore throat/sinus pain).  Greg and I have missed all our MOPS stuff & coffee dates & play dates.  It’s making me cranky.

I’ve pretty much watched every movie in the house that is safe to watch in front of Greg and am now starting to watch things like Pretty Woman and wonder why,oh,why anyone thought a movie about a prostitute was acceptable for young people to watch.  As a kid watching it, it was AWESOME, but as a mom watching it, I’m thinking about things like Vivienne getting tetanus from getting scratched on the fence and what kind of horrible germs are in that toilet that she just plunged her hand into and whoa, all the dirt!  Yeah.  I watched Legend & Total Recall last week (after kid hours) and was amazed at all the gore.  My brain, it is exploding.  I shouldn’t be allowed movies in this state.  No, no, no.

In other news, we’ve been on a science kick around the house.  David had to do a research paper & model & report on a natural disaster and he, naturally, chose a meteor shower.  So we did that.  We also made a tsunami, because a meteor strike in water can cause that.  Then we made a tornado in a jar.  One of the other class mom’s is a biologist of some sort & she brought a bunch of chemicals up to school & did a demonstration, so David wanted to know what kind of chemicals he had access to at home, so we tried to figure that out & then figure out what kind of experiments we could do from here without buying anything special.

Ben’s started doing math at school.  He got a 100 on his first paper (BEST IN CLASS, MAMA!!!) and has ever since been making his own math problems to work after school.  He’s also been learning about coins and passed that mania on to Greg, who has been playing pirate or shopkeeper, whichever one takes his fancy as long as he gets to count the money.  Ben’s been trying to teach him that each coin “costs” a different amount, but Greg just counts number of coins.  It’s very funny to watch them argue about it.

I finally got my writing notebook back in the mail, so worked on that a bit yesterday.  Progress notes to be posted at dreamwidth.

Nick is obsessed with the Olympics, which has been fun, I guess.  He’s the kind of person that will watch any event, so if the Olympics is on at any point, he turns the TV on.  I, on the other hand, am mainly just interested in the figure skating (so I went to bed way early last night).

I guess February doesn’t completely suck.  I just wish we all would get better finally.

Read this year

I thought I hadn’t read much this year so far, but apparently I’m wrong:

7. Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Sword & Sorceress XXI
6. Adele: Jane Eyre’s Hidden Story by Emma Tenant
     Wretched.  Terrible.  Please don’t read this if you cared for Jane Eyre at all.  She took the characters and made them different people and changed around things that we know to be true from the original novel (like oh, say, when something happened.).  I understand the idea of playing around with the behind-the-scenes of a famous novel, but this is just not the way to go.

5. Jane Eyre
     Lovely, as ever.  This time around I noticed more of the God talk in there that I don’t think I ever really paid attention to before.

4.  Wide Sargasso Sea
    This time around I noticed a few little places where things didn’t quite line up to Jane Eyre, but for the most part this is a really good prequel.

3.  Drink Down the Moon by Charles de Lint
2. Jack the Giant Killer by Charles de Lint
     I read these two back-to-back, so I don’t remember a lot of detail from one to another.  They were really good though, and I will re-read them again in the future (which says a lot, because I don’t spend a lot of time rereading unless it’s a favorite classic)

1. Out of the Dust by Karen Hesse
     This wasn’t what I was expecting, a little book of daily poems about living in the dust bowl, but it was so very good.

Also currently reading: Midnight Girl by Will Shetterly, Cranford by Elizabeth Gaskell, and Our Hearts Were Young and Gay by Cornelia Otis Skinner (depending on my mood).