Thursday, February 4, 2016

Just another day in Mexico

In the midst of all the drama with our melted crayons, my neighbor came to my door. "Check your back yard!" she says. "There is something dead back there."  At this point, I am praying that it isn't one of our dogs. Thankfully, the boys were occupied, so I slip to the back yard and sure enough, there is a dead animal. Thank you Jesus, I could see instantly that our dogs were fine. It was a cat. A big cat, that had obviously been dead for a few days. Here is the problem.........the cat wasn't back there an hour before. And then all of a sudden, BAM! In the middle of the yard, dead cat and at least 50 HUGE vultures. My dogs were going nuts trying to get the vultures and I was trying to get the dogs chained up before they messed with the dead cat or the vultures messed with them. I must confess, for a moment, I was a little worried that our female (she is only 6 months) might get carried off. I mean, these are big birds! Anyway, I got the boys to help me tie the dogs up in the hopes that the vultures would carry off the dead cat. On a side note, my kids got an interesting show of nature. They proceeded to sit on the back steps and watch the birds fight over and eventually carry away the carcass. Too much info? Sorry. This is just another day in Mexico.

Melted Crayons??

Well, after seeing so many posts and article about melted crayons and all the things that you can do with them, my children and I decided to do a simple project today. Yeah.......we thought.

We got out all of our old crayons, since N (6 yrs.) doesn't like crayons but prefers pen, and peeled all of the wrapping off of them. Then we broke them up and put them into the cookie cutters like we read. Um....dummy me, I didn't think about how that OBVIOUSLY wasn't going to work the way we read it would. So after the requisite 7 min at 275 degrees, we pulled out our baking sheet.....and....yeah, you guessed it.......melted crayon everywhere. Just a full baking sheet of melted colors. Oh, did I mention that it broke through a part of the tin foil (I lined my pan) and so my entire baking sheet has a thin layer of crayon now? Yes.......not my idea of fun.

As if this wasn't enough drama for the day, I had the great idea that maybe, JUST MAYBE, I could save our project. So I waited until the crayons cooled, put some coffee filters in my muffin tin (since I don't have muffin holders), broke the cooled crayons up into pieces and tried it again. ::sigh:: It did NOT work!!! Now, I have TWO pan with melted crayons stuck in the bottoms. I must say.....this will be our last attempt with melted crayons. Right about now, I'm thinking we were insane for trying this. Not to mention the fact that my kids are all feeling like it was a major waste of their time.

On a better (hopefully) note, we have another project planned for tomorrow. Lets hope that this one turns out right! I'll keep y'all posted!


Wednesday, February 3, 2016

A Drop of Water

Well, just the other day we did our first science experiment. S has "A Drop of Water" for science. Our first experiment with this book was about surface tension. You have to take a bowl of water and a needle. Without breaking the surface tension of the water, you have to get the needle to float on the surface. It is even trickier than it sounds, trust me! If you don't do it just right, the needle sinks. We finally figured out that if you will use a bent paper clip to gently slide the needle onto the surface of the water, it won't sink. S was thrilled when he finally succeeded. Of course, then E and N also wanted to do the experiment. It turned into a 45 min session and everyone wanted to be videoed. I've never been big on science experiments, but this was great fun!


A Drop of Water