The Pom-Pom Snowball Fight (and other Children's Museum Adventures)

Do everyone's Christmas traditions look weird when written down, or just ours? For example:

• over-the-top synchronized-to-music Christmas lights display
• Christmas train ride around the park
• cherry bread, cranberry salad, and deviled eggs
• Santa walking on the roof and scaring the kids half to death
• homemade mix tape of bad Christmas music
• the whitetail deer Christmas sweater

Of course, we do have some normal traditions. We cut down our tree at the tree farm every year (the day after an ice storm this year, and the van got stuck on a patch of ice on the dirt road, and I had to drag all the floormats out to give the wheels some traction). We make gingerbread houses from scratch. We eat too much fudge. And we go see Santa, this year at the Children's Museum of Indianapolis, which also may have my newest, most favorite, weirdest Christmas tradition of all traditions:

Yeah, it's a pom-pom snowball fight.

Syd took one look at this snowball fight made of chaos, and popped her reindeer ears of "Do not throw pom-pom snowballs at my head":

Will, however, was holy freakin' cow all OVER this game! She plays to win, too, as I can well attest after having several pom-pom snowballs thrown at my face in the kids vs. parents round:

Seriously, I don't think she looked as happy on Christmas day itself as she did while contentedly throwing pom-pom snowballs at children's heads. 

Syd much preferred the scavenger hunt, although the answer that she gave at the ice fishing station totally bummed her elf handler out:

No matter. They spread the love for animal rights, and they won their elf ears, anyway:

 I don't know if you can tell, but I explicitly instructed Will in the wearing of her elf ears to make her resemble as much as possible a Tolkien-esque woodland elf. In a few years, this kid and I are doing cos-play at Gen Con!

 And later, they were utterly baffled as to why they were earning a big, fat F in catenary arch building:

Don't worry, they eventually figured it out, and only one of them threw a fit.

Later, in the gift shop, I took each girl aside separately and told her that if she picked out a Christmas gift for her sister and sneaked it to me, I would buy it for her to give. I then had the pleasure of watching each kid become very invested in figuring out what the other would like best for Christmas, asking pointed questions like, "Ooh, what lovely stuffed animals! Which do you like best!" and "I just love Hot Wheels, don't you? Which Hot Wheel is YOUR favorite?" Will immediately figured out that I had just as secretly told Syd the same thing that I'd secretly told her, and cracked up at Syd's machinations, but my Syd, who NEVER suspects an agenda, just as happily and innocently answered all of Will's questions about which she liked better, the gold panning kit or the color-by-number book, as if she wasn't asking Will the same types of questions for her own secret purpose.

In the end, Syd chose a hydra-like three-headed dragon for Will (who collects dragons, did you know?), and Will chose for Syd the remote-controlled snake that gives me nightmares.

Just this morning, as I put my feet up at the breakfast table and again insisted to Syd that I did NOT want her to drive the remote-controlled snake into my feet ANYMORE because it CREEPED. ME. OUT!!!, Syd held up the snake and said, "Come on, Momma! It doesn't even look real at all! Real snakes don't have glowing red eyes!"

Yeah, thanks, Will.

Six Months to The Gettysburg Address

This one was a toughie!

The big kid started memorizing "The Gettysburg Address" in May, lost interest, got re-inspired in June after our trip to Gettysburg and memorized most of it, lost interest again, half-heartedly kept plugging away at it at my insistence, got re-inspired to really work at it so that she could recite it as her entry into Mr. Craft Knife's extended family's Thanksgiving Day talent show, recited most of it but skipped a tricky couple of lines (Lincoln really loved to stack those clauses!), tried to call it a day's work since it had been both mostly memorized and publicly performed, nevertheless bullied those last couple of tricky lines into her head as I told her to do, and then finally, FINALLY...

...MEMORIZED IT!

I won't say that she loves it (after working that hard at it for that long, she kind of understandably loathes it), but she does know it, can translate it, understands it, and can contextualize it for you if you ask her nicely.

And you know what? I'm gonna go ahead and call it: one day she WILL love it again. One day she'll be teaching a history class of her own, or running for office, or, more likely, chatting up a nice someone-or-other in a bar somewhere, and she'll pull some relevant section of "The Gettysburg Address" up out of her memory and use it, thoughtfully. She may or may not include the story of how her mean mother made her first memorize it at the age of nine, but she will definitely, after all that time, at least not be mad that I did it.

And if she can also work in how she knows all the presidents in chronological order, so much the better!

P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, dog-walking mishaps, encounters with Chainsaw Helicopters, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!

Red Cabbage pH Indicator

The kids are fascinated with chemistry! We're still studying acids and bases, doing a lot of playing and demonstrating while reinforcing the concepts (mental note: I NEED to figure out a good, buildable molecular modeling system ASAP), and so the other week Syd and I made red cabbage pH indicator for us to play with:

(Don't you just love our manky kitchen? The top of the microwave is the official place to cram all the dish towels, and yes, our countertops are made out of genuine plywood, but not the kind that leaches chemicals into your food. I think...)

Red cabbage pH indicator is the BEST thing to make! It's super easy and super fun to play with, and the vividness of the reactions makes them really satisfying. And unlike a lot of what we've been doing for chemistry so far, we don't know what most of these reactions will be in advance, which makes this an actual experiment, not a demonstration--yay!

So grab a liquid from wherever, pour a little bit into a test tube, add a little red cabbage pH indicator, agitate, and observe. Did the liquid turn a shade of beautiful pink?

You've got an acid!

Did your liquid turn gorgeous blue?

It's a base!

Can you actually not figure out what it's doing?

Yeah, that happens, too.

See, who ever said that organic chem was nothing but a weed-out class, anyway?

The kids had a marvelous time collecting various reactions-- 

--so much so that they *almost* didn't mind me making them write down all their observations, scientific-like.

And when they were thoroughly done playing, we still had over a pint of red cabbage pH indicator left to put in the refrigerator for later play:

Although how we could forget about that when we were dissecting batteries yesterday, I do not know. Bummer!

There are still a few activities that we could do for further study of acids and bases:

• Acids are the electrolytes in batteries--build a penny battery and a lemon battery. 
• The acid+base chemical reaction can carbonate beverages--make carbonated water and chocolate soda.
• Acids can clean metal and dissolve rock. 

We almost need to do a unit on atoms and molecules, though, before really proceeding much further, since I know the kiddos aren't understanding my explanations of hydrogen and hydroxide and why they want to be given up and re-combined, and Will's been getting very interested in the periodic table of elements lately, so it's possible that we'll switch instead from straight chemistry to a unit study on the elements that encompasses chemistry and other scientific and historical concepts...

Isn't science so exciting? 

P.S. If you've know of a good, buildable molecular modeling system, hit me up with it! I *want* the Zometool Molecular Mania Science Kit, since I already have a billion other Zometools, but I'm wondering if I could just spray paint the spheres in the kit that I already have to be the correct colors and score a bootleg copy of the instructions, instead. Or I could use gumdrops and toothpicks, but I'd end up eating the gumdrops. Hmmm...

My Latest over at Crafting a Green World: Free Chocolate and Disaster Preparedness

a write-up of the Make Your own Chocolate Kit from Glee Gum

a re-post of a colleague's round-up of DIY prepper projects

and a giveaway of your choice of your very own Make Your own Candy Kit from Glee Gum

The giveaway, in particular, is something that I am SUPER excited about. I want you to go over to CAGW right now and enter it, because I really, really, really want you to win, and then I want you to come back and tell me which candy kit you chose and how yummy it was.

Because it's going to be so yummy!

Fire Requires Oxygen

The premise of this demonstration is the knowledge that a chemical reaction of an acid and a base produces carbon dioxide and a salt, so it's a good one to conduct after you've been studying acids and bases for a bit.

You know, make the volcano, mix citric acid and baking soda and then add water, play with litmus paper, make red cabbage pH indicator solution, and THEN light things on fire!

NOTE: I bought some long-handled matches just for the kids, because yep, I let them play with matches.

First, have the kiddos stick a match into an empty test tube, just to prove that putting a match into the test tube won't necessarily cause it to go out.

Next, put a teensy scoop of baking soda in the bottom of a test tube. Punch a hole in a piece of paper, then syringe up a teensy bit of vinegar into an eyedropper and poke the eyedropper through the hole in the paper.

Set the paper on top of the test tube, so that the gasses formed by the chemical reaction won't be able to completely escape, and drop a couple of drops of vinegar into the test tube. You should see the chemical reaction when the acid and base mix.

Light another match, then remove the paper from the test tube but tip it, so that the gasses still can't escape. Just as you did before, stick a match into the empty test tube:

This demonstrates two facts: fire can't exist in all gasses, and the result of the vinegar and baking soda reaction is one of those gasses in which fire can't exist. The textbooks tell us that this particular gas is carbon dioxide--on another day, we can do more playing to try to prove or disprove this claim.

After the kiddos finished writing up and illustrating their demonstration and its results, Will enjoyed trapping the smoke from lit matches in an overturned test tube and observing it--

--and Syd and I later went out onto the driveway so that she could light some small fires while I put branches through the wood chipper:

Frankly, most of our science classes end with starting fires.

And that's okay by me!

One Spoiled Cat

This is the kind of stuff that Syd does to sleepy cats:

On the one hand, Syd is an inveterate cat pesterer, but on the other hand...

Gracie DOES look comfy, doesn't she?

Seven Photos from Christmas

Because seven photos are all I took. Seriously, my kids took more photos than me (with Polaroid film so they're even MORE awesome).

What I did not take photos of:

• The Hodos' amazing Christmas display. If you've never seen one of those houses that do Christmas lights on a major scale, you're missing out.
• Every time we went to Wal-mart. It's like some unwritten rule--every single time we visit my family in Arkansas, we end up at Wal-mart every. Single. Day. Once we bought hot chocolate mix there. Once we bought batteries. We bought me a knit cap, because I forgot mine in Indiana. We bought a flask for my kid cousin, before I double-checked and realized that he's actually TWENTY, not twenty-one (We gave it to him anyway, but NOT filled with hard liquor as in the original plan. Next year, Slick!).
• The gallows. Also required visiting in Ft. Smith. I have photos of me and my friends at the gallows on my wedding day. I'm not in my wedding dress, though... although in retrospect, I totally should have been!
• Pie. Matt, the girls, and I may have accidentally eaten an entire pumpkin pie before Christmas. Once I learned that Papa had made TWO pumpkin pies this year... well, it was inevitable.
• Christmas Eve pizza dinner. We got take-out from a different place this year, a place that clearly did not get the memo that in Arkansas, Hawaiian Delight pizza has maraschino cherries on it! HELLLLLOOO! Also, my baby cousin still eats Parmesan cheese straight, just like she did as a toddler.
• Santa stomping across the roof for the kids to hear. I've mentioned before that in previous years this event has driven Syd to hysterical tears, and frankly, it IS terrifying--Santa sounds like he's an inch over your head and is about to fall on top of you and kill you dead--but this year Syd was more than half asleep by the time Santa arrived, and as we hear the tremendous noise, and I brace myself for what seems like the inevitable fall and many broken bones, all she says is, "Be more quiet, Santa, please. Thank you," as if she was correcting her noisy sister, who, incidentally, was already asleep. A few minutes later, when Santa departs with much jingling, Will, too, is momentarily awakened. I hear her exclaim, "Sleigh bells!", and then she's back asleep, too.
• Syd finding a fallen sleigh bell on the sidewalk the next morning. She put it on the collar of her favorite stuffed animal and carries it nearly everywhere, which is weird, since it's clearly broken--I can't hear it make a sound.
• Will's brand-new stunt pogo stick. It's big enough for me to ride. I'm learning to pogo, y'all!
• My Aunt Pam's serious Christmas dinner spread, particularly the epic highlights of that dinner: cranberry salad and deviled eggs. 
• Me watching the Doctor Who Christmas Special that evening (my Papa has cable!), wearing jammy pants and my new Doctor Who T-shirt (from the kids), eating leftover cranberry salad and deviled eggs. Food of the gods, I tell you.
• Riding the Christmas train at the local park. It's a miniature train, my friends. A TRAIN! Textbook magical.

What I did take photos of:

 Pre-Christmas chatting with Santa. These kids rolled a +12 Innocence and Childhood Wonder and Sweetness that day. Ever since I took this photo, I've been looking at it whenever the kids pull their usual crap to remind me that they're actually adorable quite often. Just not when they're pulling their usual crap.

 Christmas morning. I was *trying* to get a photo of that sweet mixture of excitement and nervous anticipation on Will's face as we get ready to go see what Santa left them, but Syd's also behind her pulling her usual crap. Just remember that picture with Santa, Julie!

 Giant set of Darda racetracks. This was a freakin' Christmas win!!! The kid have played with this thing more hours than not since Christmas morning.

 Syd's face as she watches Matt open his present from her, a scarf that she and her sister sewed for him themselves. I guess I'll keep her, even though she does throw those rabbit ears around when I'm trying to take pictures.

 Two new Girl Scouts! And yes, it's clear that Syd has no idea what a Girl Scout is. Or does. Or whether or not she salutes her mother.

 Will chose a remote-controlled snake for her sister's present. Syd adores it. It gives me the willies.

Matt's Christmas sweater. My mama gave this sweater to Matt for Christmas the year before she died. Bless her heart, who knows what she was thinking--Deer? Really?--but Matt beamed when he opened it, told her he loved it, wore it the entire day (in that over-heated Arkansas house, no less), and has worn it all day, Christmas day, every Christmas since. I see my Mama in that ugly sweater every Christmas, and I see that good man I married, who's happy to wear an ugly sweater in her memory.

We are deep in the land of Staycation this week--my favorite place! There's a lot of hot chocolate with Bailey's here in this land, a lot of swimming in the YMCA's indoor pool, a lot of playing video games, a LOT of novel reading, a lot of baking of delicious things.

A lot lot LOT of happiness here, too, of course, but I bet you could have guessed that.