Sunday 11 May 2014

Indoor Fireworks and Homing Toads

They've all been making the most of the garden in the last week or so...


...as well as playing quite a few board games...



...and learning some magic tricks after we watched some on tv.


There's been planking in the dentist's waiting room...


...reading stories...


...defeating zombies...


...spotting trains on the back of lorries...


...and Sprout noticing that the logo for this restaurant we passed...


...looked similar to this symbol that he knew.


Squidge and Moppet have done some painting (Squidge painted all sorts of recognisable things, and I had a momentary 'erk' reaction when he painted over them, but reminded myself in time that that's not what it's about!)


We had a quick lunch out after spending the afternoon at a friend's house...


...and Sprout devised a cypher.


He'd mentioned he wanted to do a Coke/Pepsi taste test, so I got a bottle of each on the shopping. He did the test blind, and was surprised that the one he described as 'plastic tasting' was Coke, and the one he described as 'aMAZing, definitely Coke!' was Pepsi :)


He and I went for a short dinner out together one night, and he built a compass face out of chicken and explained the layout of something he'd taken part in in terms of compass directions.


We spent a very sunny-rainy-sunny-rainy-sunny afternoon in the park with friends...



...then went home and experimented with burning things with other friends.


We headed for their grandparents' house one day to take a look on the nestbox cam at the baby birds that had hatched. There had been ten eggs but we could only see six babies, but some might not have been visible.


Squidge showed his grandpa his new scooter moves...


...and we went to look for the mouse that had moved into the compost heap. The mouse was nowhere to be seen, but the toad from the week before had migrated back.


Sprout did another Kids Can Do It class, and made this magazine box, and decorated it with monsters that he's planning on painting.
He's been playing on his server quite a bit this week, and skyping with friends, and working out some of the intricacies of friendships (with some support from us where he wants it). He's made a couple of new friends online this week too so he's been chatting to them and showing them round his server.


A very rainy few days has meant that our very own Peppa Pig has been happily jumping and splashing in muddy puddles pretty much every day :)


More mud :)


Squidge has been enjoying watching Cirque du Soleil shows that we recorded a while back. He's also been watching Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and Sprout asked whether everyone in the whole world knew about milk chocolate, so that led to quite an interesting little tangent about economics and societal norms around the world.


Moppet has been finding it funny to dress up in her brothers'/Daddy's clothes...



Sprout and Squidge tried out a boxing class...


We went along to another rainy home ed meet, where we got very wet and Squidge was pleased to find that his frisbee stuck to wet clothes if they were smooth, but not fluffy ones like Moppet's.



Sprout has been playing with the Devolve Me app to see how creepy he can make the results...


We set off some indoor fireworks, which I was pleasantly surprised with considering some of the reviews! One of them left a blue residue on the plate, and I was halfway through saying I wondered if it had copper in it when Sprout said maybe it had cobalt in it as that was blue. The things you learn from Terraria :) He also suggested that the chemical that made the green flames on one of the fireworks could have been the same one that makes emeralds green... Now the recipe of indoor fireworks seems to be a closely guarded secret, but emeralds' green is from chromium, and chromium is (or at least was) used to colour fireworks, so possibly a good deduction! The kids and their friend were especially fascinated with what the black snakes are made from, so I was pleased to find a DIY recipe here http://chemistry.about.com/od/chemistryhowtoguide/a/blacksnakes.htm which we'll try at some point.




The incessant rain has turned our garden back into a bog, so cue some more playing in the mud, and this time they were completely covered by the time they came in! They played with some fun snaps while they were out there too, inkeeping with the fires and explosives theme that had developed, and compared what happened when they threw them compared with when they stamped on them, or even when they rolled them into puddles :)

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