mathmom's blog

Today we watched the space shuttle Discovery take off---live, but via computer. I still remember sitting in class watching the first one take off (or maybe not the first one---the teachers might have worried that something would go wrong). The whole school stopped, there were cheers, and everyone wanted to be an astronaut. I'm still not sure where I watched it---there almost certainly weren't enough TVs to go around, but the gym doesn't sound feasible. Probably we went down the hall to watch with another class. I remember when Challenger was destroyed: launches were routine enough that school didn't stop for them, but exciting enough that they still put TVs in the hall for us all to see. I was near the home ec classroom, and I remember talking to my sewing teacher, although I'm not sure I understood what was going on. Today as we were watching, I wondered what kind of space flight my kids would live to see. Luke watched with glowing eyes: "It's takin...

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 .

http://www.candyexperiments.com/p/experiments.html I can't wait!

When Eleanor was younger (although not that much younger) I would say good night to her with the old poem: Good night! Sleep Tight! Don't let the bedbugs bite! But if they do, take your shoe, And beat them till they're black and blue! She thought it was pretty funny, and Eleanor made up more verses: Take a pot, and boil them till they're red and hot! Take your bed and squish them till they're good and dead! In all those years, she never wanted to know what a bedbug was, or if she really had to be worried about them. I had been hesitating to say the poem to Amanda. I'm not even sure that I knew why, except that my vague misgivings were confirmed the other night when I told Amanda the poem. "Mom, what's a bedbug? Are they real? Do we have bedbugs? If we did, would we really use our shoe? Can they climb under our sheets? How do you get rid of them?" I answered as best I could---we don't have any, they're real, we'd wash the sheets in r...

Eleanor just tied 6 plastic grocery bags together with a ribbon and made a "parachute". She tied one of our small plastic toys to the end of the ribbon, threw it over the railing, and watched as it floated slowly to the ground. She then untied the toy and threw it over the railing alone, and it fell very fast! She's unwilling right now to tie heavier things to the parachute to see what the weight limits are. But I'm still proud =)

We love going to the park near our house. There is a playground with shade. There are birds. There is a pond. There are walking paths. There are turtles, fish, ducks and geese. My biggest problem with the last set is that for many children, the highlight of coming to the park is feeding the animals. They love to go onto the bridge and dump crackers and bread and whatever into the pond and see what eats it. It seems harmless enough, except that there are big signs at either end of the bridge saying "DON'T FEED THE WILDLIFE!" The pond gets messed up since the animals don't eat the algae. The animals get messed up from eating human food. The geese don't migrate. And the guests at the park are bothered by pushy ducks who chase you along the paths if you don't bring food. (Ever since I watched "The Birds" I've had a bit of a bird phobia...) I admit that I once liked to feed the turtles. It is very convenient that they hear footsteps on th...

The other night at dinner (during my internet outage), we were talking about what Eleanor and Amanda wanted for lunch the next day. Eleanor announced, "If you put salt on apple slices, they don't get brown." My immediate reaction was to tell her that her idea was silly, and that you put lemon juice on apples to keep them from going brown. Not only that, but salted apples would taste terrible! For the purposes of education, I squelched that reaction. After all, I had never put salt on apple slices, even though I had a pretty good idea of what would happen. I asked Eleanor where she had learned the fact about apples. Her teacher had said so, at least, that's what Eleanor thought she had said. Well, the tried and true way to see if something works is to do it yourself, so I suggested an experiment. We took 3 slices of apple (Mountaineer apples, very tasty) and sprinkled one with salt, one with lemon juice, and left one alone. The one sprinkled with salt made the...

On the back of our cereal there is a game which has color words written in different colors: the word "orange" will be written in pink, for example. Your challenge is to try to say the color of the word instead of what is written. Try it out here . It's a fun game, and Eleanor has gotten pretty good. Eleanor points out that it is easier for people with glasses to play without glasses, and for people without glasses to play with glasses. The real champion is Amanda, who is not confused by the written words and goes straight to the color. It is fun to see her do something easily that causes the older folks in the family trouble. In other news: Amanda's hands, which she calls "butterflies", are going to be stinky shoes for Halloween. Luke really enjoys playing with the beeping dive ball that Michael got for playing with at the pool (you have 90 seconds or something to find it and turn it off...). "Bee Bee BEE! Baa Baa." He loves beeping thing...

I was feeling kind of sad---I had spent all day cleaning up after the kids and trying to get things done for Eleanor's birthday party on Sunday, and the house is still a disaster area. So I went up to do some computer therapy, and Michael pointed out that the world record for most mentos and diet coke geysers had just been broken in Belgium . I couldn't watch the video there (caused firefox to crash) so I went to youtube, and found this . I watched a few more world record breaking geysers and found myself in a better mood. Thank goodness for the internet.

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!