robots!

noah got stacking robots for his birthday. they are so cool.

nicholas was playing with them and learned about gravity, balance and (a)symmetry.

birthday boy!

noah's birthday was march 3. (the day after his cousin reilly's. they missed sharing a birthday by 2 1/2 hours.) we had his party on that saturday. i'm a little late with the pictures. :p

(i don't know why all my pictures have been coming out grainy *shrug*)

birthday boy <3>

he hid in the kitchen with daddy for the first half hour.

one he finally came out of the kitchen, he sat on my lap. haha


nicholas let noah open one present.

then he opened the rest.

i'm not sure noah will allow that next year.

he didn't get anything plastic!

his cake got contaminated with chili and little boy fingers. oh well. it still tasted good.

everyone had fun with the punching balloons.

nicholas in particular! lol

rain!

it rained last week. which is always exciting around here. we didn't even know it was supposed to rain. we just looked out the window and there it was. :p

noah was kind of confused

nicholas wanted a closer look so he procured a collection device.

it's not a beer cup at all.

noah got cold pretty quick.

nicholas kept playing.

zeer pot

i read about zeer pots a few months ago. it is 2 pots. one pot inside the other with sand and water in between. the water evaporates and cools the inside pot. you can put food inside and it acts like a refrigerator. they only work where the humidity is less than 20%.

our fridge went out on thursday. it didn't get fixed until monday. it was horrible. it's hard to realize how dependant we are on modern conveniences until they are gone. we have a mini-fridge but it only holds a few things. we had to throw out everything from the freezer. even food that didn't necessarily go bad because it all stank like rotting meat. gross.

if the small zeer pot we made today works out, we are going to put together a big one and use it, along with the mini-fridge instead of a regular refrigerator.

here is the pdf from the guy that invented it.

and an article from Science in Africa.

the set up (plus our sage and basil plants in the blue pots on the end)

sifting sand

we plugged up the holes with modeling clay.

pour sand in the bottom until the top of the small pot is level with the top of the big pot.

pour sand down the sides.

noah wanted to help.

fill it up with water.

<, >, or =

right now, in math nicholas is working on greater, less than or equals by looking at the number only. when he was doing <, >, or = by looking at the number and objects, steven made him some alligators. the alligator wants to eat the bigger number so it faces the number it wants to eat. the mouth shows the correct symbol. the equals guy is underwater and can't decide which one he wants because they are both the same.

books!

i <3 book sales. we went to one on saturday and got all this for $2.25!

~the owl and the pussycat - edward lear & jan brett
~david and goliath - penny frank
~happy faces - celebrate reading textbook (i'm not sure what grade level)
~big bug, little bug - a follett beginning to read book (it's old and falling apart but i can't resist old books. the page with the copyright is torn out. i researched it a little more and it's c.1963)
~you're in love, charlie brown - charles schulz
~happy birthday, noah - june morris arnold (a noah's ark book - not a happy coincidence like i originally though)
~sword in the stone - disney
~the young folks shelf books, vol. 7, the animal book - a collection - c. 1938
~houghton mifflin literary readers textbook, book 3 - a collection
~the ugly duckling and other fairy tales - hans christian anderson
~junior science book of trees - robert lemmon - c. 1960
~homonyms - joan hanson - c. 1972
~synonyms - joan hanson - c. 1972
~more synonyms - joan hanson - c. 1973
~a treasury of mother goose - illus. hilda offen
~the ladybird book of fairytales - rose impey
~the picture dictionary for children - garnette watters & s.a. courtis - c. 1968 32nd printing
~literature based geography activities - tara mccarthy - scholastic, grades k-3

grown up books:
~don juan - ludwig lewisohn - c.1923
~astronomy - john charles duncan - c. 1926 (this book is so cool. it has ton of notes penciled in in the margins. like when certain events happened "8pm on thursday". in the front cover it has a name/address/phone number. the phone number only has 3 numbers in it - 698.)

they played sword in the stone while i read it to them. :)

queen of hearts

last week's poem was the queen of hearts.

nicholas was VERY upset by the line "and beat the knave full sore." it made him sad. :(

the idea of making some tarts made him feel better though. we made some lemon tarts with some lemons steven got from a costumer's tree. we used this recipe for the filling. i cheated and used frozen pie crust. pie crust is on my list of things i still need to learn but am nervous about messing up so i haven't tried yet.


no pics of the finished product because i burned them. ahem.

they were still edible... just not pretty. :P

lunches!

we've been keeping up with the muffin tin lunches. noah's been getting one too because he wants everything the same as big brother. :P

yogurt, organic cheese-its, bacon
apple slices, granola, carrots

leftover fried rice, granola, peanuts
carrots, yogurt, chicken

noah stealing nicholas' lunch. don't worry. he didn't eat the peanuts ;)


and just like noah has to do everything like nicholas, nicholas has to be just like steven.

felt balls

we've been making felt balls like crazy. today, we dyed some in kool-aid.

you put a little water in the bottom of a pot. colander goes in the pot, balls with dye on them go in the colander. steam for 20 minutes.

red, blue, purple and yellow
they are all koolaid except the blue. the blue is regular food coloring. it didn't dye as well as the koolaid.

our new collection on handmade wool balls.
(now we can get rid of some plastic ones!)

noah discovering that some balls make noise and some don't.

fun with wool

today's muffin tin lunch was on a mozz cheese, golden grahams, crunchy granola thingies, baby carrots, and a turkey and cheese roll-up on a homemade tortilla.


this afternoon i got a pound of wool roving from my friend kellie at mindful life shop. first, we watched a few videos on youtube of sheep being sheared. then we watched a video showing how to make a felt ball (part 1 and part 2). we made the inner core the same as in the video. we don't have any felting needles so we used regular wool yarn and big needles.

ran out of yarn!

felting the yarn.

felting the yarn didn't really work but that's ok! we can still play with them!