mathmom's blog

Ella's latest story: "We split it 50-0" It was a hot July morning and my brother was trying to get me to eat an egg he had fried on the sidewalk.... Wish I knew what happened next... =)

Ella now has glasses. She sees fine out of one eye, but the other eye needs correction. What that means is that often she'll take off her glasses---when she's sweaty, when they're uncomfortable, when they are inconvenient. Yesterday, as we were packing, I noticed that she didn't have her glasses on. "Could you find them please?" I asked, thinking that this was a reasonable request. What followed was actually a pretty thorough (and needed) cleaning up of all the toys all through the house. We put away the books, picked up all the craft sticks and tinker toys, cleared all the plastic animals off the window sill, put back most of the National Geographics ... All we got was a cleaner house. Ella cleaned out her suitcase, which she said was not useful because she won't put her glasses just anywhere---she only puts her glasses "on tables, or bookshelves, or desks or windowsills or things like that." We did eventually find the glasses in the crack...

Ella feels that there aren't enough limericks yet in the world, and wants to contribute. A sensitive young man from Crete Was rather disturbed by the heat; He stood on his hands Upon the hot sands To keep from burning his feet.

Ella and I (Michael) built an air film bearing hovercraft , at her specific request and sole instigation. This is surprisingly easy. The hard part is to get the right tension on the skirt. It can hold an adult. The whole family tried it (serially, not simultaneously). It's hard to really get the idea from a still image, though; it really takes a movie .

One of Ella's chores (suggested by her Aunt L.) is to put the stuff in the bread maker every night and program it so we have warm bread in the morning. This works well, and is also a great science experiment. We have discovered that: Bread made without salt looks OK but is barely edible. Bread made with 3 times the salt is inedible, and doesn't rise right. Bread made with no yeast is edible, sort of like a tasty rock is edible, and Ella really needs a system to make sure she puts the right ingredients in the right amounts in the right order. I've encouraged her to line up the ingredients on the counter before she starts along with the correct measuring equipment. After the last failure she allowed that that might be a good idea. We'll see. Here's our recipe for bread: 1 1/4 cup water 2 Tbsp. Earth Balance buttery stick 1 1/2 tsp. salt 1 1/2 Tbsp. sugar 2 cups whole wheat flour (we get ours from Great Harvest) 1 cup white flour (bread flour makes it rise better) ...

Amanda to Ella: "Could you tell me how I am annoying?" Ella looks up, speechless (for once). "By telling you things that you already know?" continues Amanda. "Yeah," answers Ella. "But I bet you already knew that..." says Amanda. I really could not have made that one up, folks.

I took the girls to their first martial arts lesson yesterday. I'd been looking around for some sort of physical activity for them---they both are taking string lessons, but I think there needs to be something more active. A friend of ours mentioned that the local studio is run and taught by women, and Ella thought that was pretty neat and wanted to try it. They got there and tried on their uniforms: both ended up being a little big, although Amanda's (the smallest size) really needs some taking up =) They got to sit on a spot on the floor, learn a few rules (don't be a bully was the most important one---don't abuse your Tae k won do). They learned a few rituals: bow to the flags (Ella correctly identified the Korean flag), tell the teacher "Thank you ma'am," jump up in the air and shout "Taekwondo!" Then they got to do a few punches and kicks into a small round foam circle. I think the main purpose of the exercises was to learn how to move ...

As Kim just blogged, we went to the mountains for Apple Festival -- for the fourth year running. Amanda was disappointed last year that she couldn't do the ropes course, and this year, as a great big five-year-old, nothing was going to keep her away. This involved a lot of waiting. First, waiting for over an hour and a half before starting climbing. Then she climbed a free rope ladder with rungs about half as far apart as she is tall, to a platform about dozen feet off the ground. Once she got there, we discovered that the "lobster claws" she was wearing were not long enough to read the safety wire, so she had to wait while they changed her over to a different set. Walking a pair of beams never seemed hard to Ella or to me, so it didn't surprise me that Amanda did fine. The bigger surprise was that she never fell off the high wire, and in fact didn't seem to have to use her hands very much -- good balance. She wanted a helping hand before she jumped across a...

Last week, Ella found the bag of fiberfill and started rolling it on the carpet to make something somewhat yarn-like. She wanted to knit with it, but since she was rolling it back and forth instead of twisting it, it wasn't really strong enough. Daddy remembered that when he was a boy, he made a drop spindle and learned to spin with it. He offered to make a drop spindle for Ella, and tonight after dinner, we went down to the shop. We put together some found objects: a scrap of wood, a long thin bolt, a scrap piece of copper wire, some electrical tape, the only two nuts we could find that fit the bolt, and a very small nail. It's not perfect but it works. We grabbed a handful of fiberfill, and twisted some thread by hand -- enough to tie to the spindle, wrap around the shaft, and slip through the hook. Then we started spinning. Ella did some of the spinning, but fiberfill was really not intended for this, so it's hard to use and makes very unforgiving thread. Ella deci...

We went biking yesterday on the greenway . It was a bit silly---we had to drive 15 minutes to get there, and then spend time wrestling our bikes out of the car and putting them back together, then we rode down to the other end of the greenway and back in about 40 minutes. But it was exercise, and it was beautiful: clear dark blue skies, warm sun but cool dry air, leaves beginning to show tinges of color. We rode through woods and a field of black-eyed susans , as well as over the highway on a pedestrian bridge---something about being above cars moving at 60 mph is really fun. Can't wait until Amanda is a good enough biker to join us, although we'll have to find something else to do with the bikes other than bringing them in the trunk of the van. I'm grateful to be in NC in the fall.