Following last month's unsuccessful attempt to make candles from brood comb, I ordered a candle making kit. I still didn't get it quite right as they wanted to melt wax and pour it, whereas I managed to order some kind of wax sand type stuff that you use solid, but they still enjoyed it and it actually worked out well as Moppet was more hands on than she probably would have been with hot wax.
Once they were made Moppet spent ages experimenting with touching the flame, she was mesmerised!
She discovered Squidge's Ben 10 silhouette torch and they had fun together shining the alien silhouettes onto various parts of the house/their own faces and making them bigger and smaller depending on how far away they were :)
Gruff had a crazy long week at work last week and Sprout told me he'd like to do something to show him how much we appreciate him, so he came up with the idea of doing him breakfast in bed along with making him a card and a photo frame and giving him the candle he'd made.
The card had a heart on the front which he told us is a core of love, surrounded by obsidian, surrounded by the ocean. :)
We had an afternoon at their grandparents' house, where Squidge and Moppet were playing with this jigsaw a lot and Sprout was delving into his uncles old 80s toys (Starcom is a current favourite!)
Eventually they got the trampoline out and bounced off some energy :)
Gruff and Squidge built his Sonic racetrack and they all spent some time finding the best way to not flip the cars off the track.
At a home ed group Moppet was kind of interested in playing with another little girl, which was a first I think (she plays with her brothers but not really other kids so far), and she got engrossed in this balancing monkey game for a little while too, among other things.
Sprout and Squidge, meanwhile, set up this elaborate space scape for their sponge men to fight the alien invaders :)
Back at home we played on the David Attenborough Natural History Museum Alive app which I downloaded after they enjoyed the programme so much, and it was lovely to listen to Sprout telling me all about the dodo, the moa, the gigantopothecus, and the diplodocus so enthusiastically. He thinks the dodo is (was!) hilarious :)
The boys spent a lot of time playing Lego Star Wars together and Need for Speed racing, and spent a bit of time sword fighting on the Wii too. Squidge tried to show Moppet how to play the Peppa Pig Wii game, but she's not quite there yet!
On tv this week there's been a lot of Peppa, courtesy of Moppet, and some Power Rangers, also some Yo Gabba Gabba which led to a conversation about the role of the stomach in digestion and how we extract energy from food via cell respiration.
I attempted an awesome snack moment for them with these giant s'mores, but they were unanimously rejected in favour of cucumber. I took a photo anyway because they were epic :)
Sprout was seriously excited to take delivery of his Loot Crate that I'd ordered him as a surprise. I didn't realise he knew what they were but apparently Nerd Cubed did an unboxing video one time. Sprout was so excited that I even got a hug, and he's not generally a hugger :D
His favourite things were the Superman Domo toy, the NASA badge and the Star Trek communicator sticker. He loved the 16 month Minecraft calendar too, and chatted about how many months are in the year, and how many days in each month (30 days hath September, etc). The Star Wars phrase book and model he gave to Squidge, and we amused ourselves counting in Jabba the Hutt's language :D
We met one of the home ed groups at Cosford RAF museum, which the boys are always up for going to. Moppet loved the magnets/compasses table and this Bernoulli effect hands on part...
...and Sprout loved explaining to them both how ball bearings reduced friction.
They didn't spend as long as usual on their previous favourite parcel drop activity...
...and we found ourselves in the cafe discussing whether water weighs anything (Sprout experimented with some cups with different amounts in), the relative densities of ice and water and how we know, tsunamis, their effects and how they feature in Roblox, who is in space right now, and which wars are going on at the moment.
One of their favourite things at Cosford is the space race presentation pod, and they happily watched that again and picked up new bits of information from it.
They found a new area with things about the Vietnam War, which they were briefly interested in but then more interested in the giant dominoes which made up the display.
We looked at lots of helmets including infantry helmets, air crew helmets, and these nuclear chemical and biological protection helmets which Sprout was very excited about as he's seen similar ones in Team Fortress 2, so he was telling us about the similarities and differences.
The boys sat engrossed through the video about the Cuban missile crisis (they always do!), while Moppet tried to catch the light going round the edge of the table.
They were both really excited about the Dornier 17 conservation project that has been put in place since we were last there. They watched the wreckage being washed down with citric acid...
...and downloaded the app to see the plane in position in augmented reality, along with a number of videos about the restoration depending on whereabouts in the base they pointed the camera.
Back at home Moppet played on the Doc Mcstuffins app...
...and took some selfies :)
I helped Sprout find the information he was looking for about things in the museum, like this map of current wars and unrest...
...this info on who's on the ISS at the moment...
...the live stream of what's going on inside the ISS (they wanted to see the ants that arrived last week but I couldn't find any video of them yet)...
...and the video of Neil Armstrong walking on the moon.
We've put Flan's mod back on Minecraft (everything from WW2 planes to Nerf guns!) along with SecurityCraft, and he's building a house he's been inspired to build by one of the pictures on the calendar from his Loot Crate. Lots of connections, tangents, and reconnections :)
