Genevieve, laughing hysterically, "Why am I so hilarious!?"

My yard thinks it's spring

And it's in for a rude awakening today. My tulips are trying to come up and the purple flowers that bloom all over my yard every year are making an appearance. Stay asleep little flowers! The world isn't safe for you yet.

Genevieve cut her hair again

She has long thick beautiful hair. But she hates caring for it. So today we had it all cut off. She had more than enough to donate so we will send it to Locks of Love.

Starting the day off right

The girls got Starbucks gift cards for Christmas.

At the bookstore

Ancient Greek Paper Dolls

Knitted dish clothes

There is something very fun about these. Probably the fact that each one took about a day. I've only been knitting a couple months and I'm still slow. So this is as close to instant gratification as I can get.

Chirstmas yummies

Charcoal

Today we did some simple charcoal drawings. When the girls are learning a new medium, I tell them to draw flowers. They are something simple that can be complicated or can be imaginary and don't have to be realistic at all. There is a lot of freedom there and if things turn out badly, it's still a flower.

Various things

A pop up ziggurat book

We decided to catch a spider and put it in a jar with twigs and observe it building a web. We planned to catch bugs for it to eat. Unfortunately, it died only a couple hours after we caught it. 

I burn light bulb candles when we need good ideas. Just kidding. Elaine's mother made this and it's pretty awesome. 

It makes people happy!

First Week of School

We've started school this week and we're off to a great start. We are studying ancient history this year which is something both girl love.

Hmmm...

Ok so maybe hair doesn't exactly get brushed before we start. 

Reading about Gilgamesh.

We drew in our nature journals this week. Imogen found these wings on the back porch.

Making a clay tablet.

And making up our own pictograph language. 

Herb garden!

I am gardening this year. This isn't something that comes naturally to me, and I've already had a few missteps, but Jeremy confessed that the limited success I've seen so far is well beyond his dismal expectations. True, I waited so long to harvest my heads of lettuce that they sat on the ground and rotted. And my peppers seem to be hiding timidly under the tomatoes. But my broccoli is doing beautifully and my tomato plants are shooting up. And yesterday I planted the herb garden above! It smells just amazing and I'm looking forward to finding all kinds of uses for my herbs. I have a mix of things I use all the time (cilantro), things I usually use dry but will love to use fresh (basil and oregano) and things I don't really use but will expand my herbal horizons. Besides, peppermint smells so yummy, who can resist?

Spring is in the air!

Which makes it a little hard to breath.

The world is full of seeds and tiny flowers and things making a mess all over the place right now. 

We headed outside to draw things in our nature journals. The grass was wet so we sat on the trampoline.

We used clear contact paper to save some of the things we drew. We have done this since we first started our nature books and the first leaves we put in over a year ago still look nice. 

I'm not very good at nature stuff, being a very indoorsy person, so we don't really identify things so much as simply observe and enjoy them. 

We drew with wild and crazy colors instead of accurate colors. 

Genevieve's book,

Imogen's book.

We have a tree that drops tons of these seeds each year. They spin wildly as they fall to the ground and my kids have always called them helicopters. 

Rainforest model

As part of our habitat study, Imogen and Genevieve created this rain forest model inside a box.

Originally we were going to do animals and plants from rain forests all over the world, which is where the bamboo came from, but in the end, all the animals ended up being from the Amazon. 

Our Anaconda. 

A sloth (on the left) and a howler monkey (on the right). 

An anteater in the foreground and a giant armadillo behind him.  

The harpy eagle is Imogen's newly found "favorite bird". 

The jaguar lurks in the background.

They are already planning out what their desert model will look like. 

When Chemistry Goes Wrong

We've been having a lot of fun mixing things up lately. But this did not go well. I followed these instructions to make a polymer bouncing ball. I followed the instructions very carefully. But hey, maybe I did something wrong. Because that picture didn't even remotely resemble what we got. 

The website said if we used clear glue, we would get translucent balls. But the corn starch made them opaque.

They were sticky and weird feeling but eventually the stickiness went away as we kneaded it. But it never had the smooth surface of a regular bouncy ball. But it did bounce. 

This was the general reaction to the weird balls.

Our complete failure to make Gak was more amusing and was also caused by my misreading the directions. We will try this one again. 

Density

I got this idea here. But I didn't do as many layers. 

We started with honey for our bottom layer. 

Dish soap. 

Vegetable oil

We forgot that water was more dense than oil, so when we poured the water (dyed green) it of course when right through the oil. We dyed the rubbing alcohol orange and put that layer on top. Even tipping the bottle and swirling it around gently did not mix the liquids. 

Testing which evaporates faster. Water (green) or rubbing alcohol (yellow).