Skip to main content

Toys

Luke has found a variety of toys to play with at his grandparent's house. They include:
  • A bucket of sand, a bucket of compost, and some plastic pots that flowers came in.
  • Two ice cream pails, one of which is filled with clothespins. He keeps biting on the open end of the clothespin and pinching his fingers.
  • The wood burning stove in the family room, which has lots of levers and knobs and is fun to bang on.
  • Folding picture frames, which both have pictures of family in them and are fun to open and close.
The girls had a good time swinging on two swings hung from the clothesline: it's a very complex system, where the girls influence each other's swings and how high they are off the ground and how they bounce up and down. They had a great time... until the clothesline broke.

Eleanor is reading. She's moved on from the Magic Treehouse books to the reference guides. Right now she's reading The Voyages of Dr. Doolittle, which has the advantage of being long enough that she doesn't breeze through it in one day.

Amanda got to ride in the Burly, a wagon pulled behind her grandparents' tandem bicycle. She was the only one of the children who would have sat still for long enough to enjoy the 45 minute ride.

Mama got to stain the deck while everyone else went to the swimming pool. It was lovely! Today I get to do the laundry... I'll do other things as well, but it is nice just going through the day without being the only person that the children can ask for attention.

This of course ignores the best toys, which are the grandparents themselves. We're all having a good time.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Things that are true

"Axial tilt is the reason for the season." (Picture a globe with the northern hemisphere tilted away from the sun...) I believe this is meant to be an anti-theist slogan, although I would point out that I believe there is a reason for the axial tilt. This is a runner up to my favorite true science picture, the "Gravity Forecast." I linked to this when I was a graduate student, but the site is long since down. Picture a weather forecast graphic, but instead of clouds and temperatures, the 5-day forecast predicts 9.8 m/s^2 down. Even the idea still makes me laugh, perhaps I will reproduce it someday. Luke cut his 4th tooth today (Finally!). So far they haven't caused us too much trouble. We'll see what happens when he gets his canines.

Science at home

We had a fun "experiment" yesterday. We took a 2 liter bottle of diet Coke and some Mentos, put 4 Mentos at the same time into the bottle, and shot a huge jet of soda into the air about 8 feet high! It was quite exciting, although I think the warnings that you might want to use eye protection were a bit overblown. I suppose that it was an experiment only in the loosest sense of the term, but Michael forsees lots of fun in the future: using other types of soda, other methods for adding the mentos to the soda, and so on. It did get us out of the house for a while, and had Eleanor and Amanda dropping mentos into the used soda bottle and watching to see what happened---so cute!

A day at the fair

Yesterday afternoon the whole family went to the NC state fair. We had a good enough time that I think we are going back next year, although perhaps we will leave Luke at home with a sitter. We went right after Eleanor's school. Michael picked up Eleanor, I drove Luke and Amanda. Through an amazing bit of timing, we met in the parking lot and walked to the fair together, about a 10 minute walk (not bad at all, really). I had meant to get to the fair much earlier and see the parts that Eleanor and Michael claimed not to be interested in (the animals and crafts, mostly) but I was running a little late. Our area has been in a serious drought for the past few months, so I am not complaining that it rained (hard) on us as we were getting to the gate. But it does seem a bit hard that we planned to go to the fair on the one day in the past 3 months that we had a rainstorm. Fortunately, the rain was scattered, and the clouds soon moved off to water another area. We took the opportun...