Thanksgiving break

Alex had off school Wed, Thurs and Fri for Thanksgiving. He seemed excited to have the days off and he and Maya had so much fun with the extra play time. In this picture I believe they are playing camping. Alex is under there somewhere. He thought it was funny to hide every time I got out the camera.

They played school, store, and camping. They built ramps and jumps with blocks for the hot wheels cars. They drew pictures and made forts. They read tons and tons of books together. And all of this with very, very little direction or input from grown ups. And very little arguing. It doesn't always happen that way but we had a very charmed series of days.

For Thanksgiving day we had a relatively simple early dinner, watched football, played and rented a couple video games.

Saturday afternoon we went to the Opera House to see the musical show "Duck for President, Fancy Nancy and other stories". It was very cute and the kids seemed to really enjoy it. Alex liked Duck for President best and of course Maya's favorite was Fancy Nancy. Maya did not care for the pirate story (Pirates Don't Change Diapers) but Alex said he liked them all.

By the time we got home Grandma and Papa had arrived and we got a couple mellow days of visiting in with them. They brought Maya a new (new to her) dresser that my dad refinished, it looks great in her room. I will take some pictures this afternoon.

Ben and I went out Sunday evening to see "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows" (2 thumbs up by the way!) and the kids got to order pizza with Grandma and Papa while we were gone.

Now today we are back to school and the regular routine. We have some stuffy noses. But what a great Thanksgiving break!

Random Projects

I've been trying to finish up some easy random projects around the house.

This cabinet holds all of our art/craft supplies. It sits at the end of our upstairs hallway so you look right at it every time you come up the stairs to the bedrooms. Even with mason jars and boxes and bins inside to help organize all those artsy odds and ends look messy. I was sick of being able to see the mess through the glass doors. So I got some cute, relatively cheap fabric and covered the inside of the windows. I'm pretty happy with the way it turned out, absolutely more pleasant to look at than the clutter inside!

Yum!

Ahhh those things you can learn in school...

Alex came home today singing:

"Happy Birthday to me

I'm one hundred and three

I still go to preschool

and I miss my mommy

My mommy's at work

she works for a jerk

the jerk is a monkey

and he ate my homeowork"

A sunny kitchen and dough to knead

From snow to sun

Beautiful, warm afternoon. Driveway hockey, soccer in the yard and just general running around.

Later on.....

Alex had a birthday party in the late afternoon. I brought him to the party and hung out at a book store on that side of town while he partied. Ben, Paul and Maya stayed home to play. Alex and I got home just in time to head out back and enjoy the camp fire with them. What a beautiful evening!

Outside

Uncle Paul came to visit this weekend! We had a fun morning outside playing in the snow that fell yesterday. Alex is very much into snowball fights this year, he can make passable snowballs himself now. Maya still wants you to make snowballs for her so she can then turn around and throw them at you.

And it's still snowing!

We woke up to a surprise this morning! Alex was so excited, he was cheering and dancing. As of 11:25am it is still snowing. Not too much more is accumulating on the grass but the deck and grill obviously have more.

What sort of dreams do you think?

Maya fell asleep on the couch Wed afternoon.

Adjusting to the cooler temps

Maya loves to wear dressed. A dress just doesn't seem as fancy with pants underneath. Or leggings. Tights maybe. But dresses twirl the best and feel the fanciest with bare legs according to Maya. That poses a bit of an issue now that we are into late fall. Maya's solution the other day was at first to lay in her bed with a blanket on her legs and yell "MAMAMAMAMAAAA!" whenever she wanted anything. When that didn't work out so well she moved down to the couch thinking then I might wait on her.

Candy experiments #2

Our finally dry chromatography experiment. This is how the dye in brown m &m's separates into individual colors.

Alex observed that Now and Laters felt hard enough to be bricks. So I suggested he build something with them. At first he said he was building a robot but couldn't get the tape to hold them like he wanted so he changed to building a house. Unfortunately we ran out of candy before the construction was complete! (Maya is "helping")

In the microwave we thought twizzlers would melt. But instead it blistered with a very fun little popping sound starting at about 40 sec. The next 40 sec brought more blistering and little pops. Unfortunately after that the twizzlers still did not melt, it started burning from the inside creating a really nasty smell!
Alex's lab journal to record his findings.

At one point in our experiments yesterday Alex looked at me and said "Mom, a lot of this candy is actually really, really gross when you see kind of what it's made of." I would agree! It was really gross how much of it is made primarily of color and wax!

Monday, no school, candy experiments!

This morning we got out the leftover candy we didn't hand out and the candy Alex traded in and started experimenting! Alex was most interested in the simple tests - does it float or sink? Will it crumble or dissolve? What will it look like when all the color comes off?

We got our ideas from this article and a little google work on our own.

I haven't had luck with the chromatography yet but once I am done here we are going up to give it another try.

We had lots of fun with the color density rainbow! Pouring the colors together without mixing them was tricky but we worked out a system.

We even started a lab notebook to document our findings :) Alex tells me what results to write down.

We've been surprised by how much wax is in candy.

Nerds were really fun to dissolve because the color and wax comes out and pretty much leaves clear sugar crystals.

We find ourselves now wishing we would have bought different trick or treat candy, or maybe visited a few more houses....not because we want more treats to eat but because we haven't gotten a really good acid test result and we don't have any really sour treats to try out and we only got two small bags of skittles so we can't try and make a brighter better rainbow!

Trick or Treat!

They were both super excited. Maya lasted about 4 houses and then decided she was ready to go home. She said she was feeling shy. So Ben took her home and Alex and I continued around our little circle in the neighborhood. Lots of people loved Alex's costume - a big thank you to cousin Brendan for giving him that helmet last summer!

After just the small loop in our neighborhood Alex decided he was ready to go home too. He was just as excited about handing out candy as he was about getting it!

And of course they both wanted to dump out, look at and sort their candy. And maybe eat some too.

Some of our neighbors had a good variety of treats this year. One house always makes popcorn balls (and yes I let my kids eat them even though they are homemade and not sterile and sealed), one house gave out snack size bags of chips, snack size graham crackers and our next door neighbor makes little treat bags for the kids that she knows.

We went through right away and Alex picked out all the things with red dye in them and we had gotten some "safe" treats to have on hand for him to trade them in for. I got the Annie's gummie fruit snacks and some Yummy Earth suckers. Seriously, if you've never had one of those suckers you have got to try them, they are so good! Maya would like to trade some of her candy for them too!

They had a blast handing out candy for the rest of the night.