29 April 2012

There was no school on Monday- another budget holiday- so we went for a hike.  This photo feels like it was taken a month ago.  It's been a very long week.

Abe competed in the Pine Wood Derby on Thursday.  He originally thought he'd make a car that looked like a banana slug, but the car morphed into a gold muscle car.  Becky broke off a piece of the bottom of the car trying to put the axles in.  The car held together pretty well until Abe's last race when the left rear wheel came off.  The wheel came in 2nd place while the car skidded slowly down the rest of the track.  This was Abe's first pack meeting to wear his snazzy blue bear kerchief, slide and hat.

Helen painted the block of wood with bright enamel paint without shaping it.  Her car won the family division.

 Brandan helped Gibson make his car into a bullet train.  Gibson could have raced his car all night-- he loved watching it go down the track.

Sofi keeps piling up math awards.  This week her school math team competed against 8 other middle schools at the regional Pentagames.  We thought Sofi looked like a military general when she came home with all the pins, ribbons and medals on her cape (the epaulettes on her cape help the effect.) Some of the awards are team awards and some are individual.  Her team won first place overall.

 Sofi uses the left and the right sides of her brain equally well.  This week Sofi also performed in her school's production of The Wizard of Oz.  This is the largest play her school has ever attempted.  Auditions for the show were in January and they've been working hard for months.  Their work came together in a terrific show.

Sofi showed some good initiative by organizing snacks for the cast for the last week and chipped in by taking a slow cooker full of snack foods every night.

Sofi played the part of the Scarecrow and was wonderful.  She was our favorite character.

The director double cast all of the lead parts in the show to give more kids a chance to be in the play.  In the shows Sofi wasn't playing the Scarecrow, she played a jitterbug.  This version of The Wizard of Oz had all sorts of unexpected characters like jitterbugs, ghosts, a skeleton.  The photo below shows Sofi in her jitterbug costume with one of the Dorothys.

Here's a photo of Gibson being goofy while we waited for Sofi after the show.

Abe had to copy Gibson.   ~   And after a week of careful consideration, Sofi decided to apply to the academic high school for next year. She put the fine arts school as her second choice.  We're confident Sofi will continue to use both sides of her very good brain.

22 April 2012

On Tuesday Gibson went for a walk with Becky in the rain.  We didn't get very much rain this winter, but a very wet spring has made up for it.

It's Pine Wood Derby time again.  Abe worked on filing his car into shape while Gibson strummed his ukulele.

It's also time for the school science fair.  Helen worked on her experiment this weekend by asking how many Mentos dropped in Coke make the tallest fountain of soda.  The photo shows what happens when 10 Mentos are dropped into a 2 liter bottle of Coke. 

We tried dragon fruit for the first time this morning.  This is the first time we've seen dragon fruit in our grocery store and the bright green and pink fruit was irresistible.

Here's a photo of Abe cutting up the fruit.  It was white with lots of tiny black seeds inside.  The fruit had a mild, sweet flavor.

Our school district has the unique arrangement of allowing all the students to choose between 3 high schools.  Each school has a different style and emphasis.  Sofi eliminated one choice fairly quickly, but is trying to decide between the 2 other schools.  One has a strong personality of innovation and academic excellence.  The other emphasizes fine arts.  Sofi is looking carefully at each school and thinking about her needs in high school.  She taped a piece of paper to our patio door to help her compare the schools.  She still has some questions to answer to help her decide.  The first two items on her list, math and English, are probably more Becky's concerns and both schools do a fine job teaching math and English.  Sofi needs to turn her application in by the end of the month.

15 April 2012

Abe achieved his goal of earning 1000 AR points with 2 months of school left.  His school honors students with 1000 AR points by engraving their names on a plaque that hangs in the school commons area.  Abe is only the 10th student to earn this award and the first 3rd grader.  The other students were all 5th graders.  His school will have to come up with a new recognition-- Abe's already set a new goal for himself of earning 1500 points.

This Saturday was the 10 mile Pear Blossom Run.  Becky has run this race several times and last fall Sofi said that she would like to run it.  She started training for the race in September, waking up early 3 times a week to run before school.  January and February were dark, cold and wet and she felt like quitting.  She stuck to it, though, and was completely prepared for Saturday.  She had a great race.  Brandan, Abe, Helen and Gibson met us at the finish line.

8 April 2012

  

After years of talking about it, we planted a bed of asparagus this week.  Asparagus starts look like bundles of roots.  You have to dig a foot deep trench to plant them in, so a raised bed is a good place for them.  Then you have to wait a year before you can harvest any asparagus.  We love to eat asparagus, so hopefully we'll be eating our own home-grown asparagus next spring.

We also planted a Camperdown elm in our backyard.  We had a eucalyptus in this corner of the yard that died.  Brandan had to use an axe to get through the roots left by the eucalyptus in order to dig a hole for the elm.

Helen and Abe are playing soccer this spring and had their first games this week.  This is Helen's first season playing soccer.  Brandan is coaching Abe's team and it's his first time coaching.

Abe turned 9 years old on Tuesday.  He asked for chocolate mousse for his birthday dessert and we crammed 9 candles into it.  We can't make substitutions for everything, but we can make very good dairy- and egg-free mousse.

 

On Saturday Abe had some friends over for a birthday party.  He had a mad scientist theme which was a hit with all the kids.  This experiment created a foaming fountain with dish soap, hydrogen peroxide and yeast.  The big rush of foam lasted less than 5 minutes, but foam continued to ooze out of the bottle for another half hour.

We got eggs stuck in a glass milk bottle by creating a vacuum.

One of the most exciting experiments was the easiest: adding alka seltzer to water in a film canister, snapping on the lid, setting it on the ground and watching it explode.  Some of the canisters shot as high as our house.  The boys blew through a box of alka seltzer fairly quickly trying to find the combination of water and alka seltzer that would make the film canisters go the highest.

Next up was biology.  We dissected a chocolate frog cake.  Brandan and Becky made the cake together.  All the boys wanted an internal organ to eat.

The last activity was also very simple and very popular.  We had a stack of spare parts (paper cups, straws, skewers, washers, tape) and challenged the boys to build something that would carry a ping pong ball down a zip line made of fishing line.  The boys worked together, testing and retesting their designs.  A note about Abe's hair: we put some pomade in the bathroom and encouraged the boys to create mad scientist hair dos for themselves.  Abe's hair got wilder and wilder as the party progressed.  

Gibson is holding the carrier that he and Brandan made.

Becky spent a good part of the week trying out science experiments she read about in books and online.  It was surprisingly hard to come up with 5-6 experiments that were impressive or interesting and actually worked.  Here are some of the flops (removing iron shavings from cold cereal and making a battery out of a lemon) and a demonstration that worked, but was boring (hovercraft made from a CD).

We've enjoyed a beautiful Easter today.  Gibson is squinting because he thinks the sun is in his eyes.  We felt pretty spoiled to walk across the parking lot after church to take photos in front of the temple.

We usually have an Easter egg hunt the Saturday before Easter, but this Saturday was very busy with 3 soccer games and a party.  Instead, Becky hid a few eggs every night this week for the kids to find.  However, after church the kids asked if they could have a big Easter egg hunt.  Becky got out the last of the Easter candy and the kids helped fill the eggs, about 1 jelly bean per egg so they would have more eggs to find.  Sofi hid all the eggs in the backyard.  Abe and Helen gave Gibson a 6 egg head start before they started looking.

1 April 2012

 WARNING: Super long post ahead.  It's been one of those weeks.   ~   The big event of our week was Gibson's 5th birthday on Monday.  He wanted a block of ice cream for a birthday cake.  He remembered the puzzle on Brandan's birthday cake this year so he asked Becky to put a tic-tac-toe game on top of his cake.

 Gibson got to have his first friend birthday party this year.  He wanted a spy themed party.  All the kids liked pretending to be spies.

For games, the kids went through an obstacle course, used clues to find a hidden bomb (a piñata), and then destroyed the bomb.   The favorite activity was building and using marshmallow shooters.

The shooters were assembled using 2, 3 and 4 inch lengths of 1/2 inch PVC pipe, connected with elbow, straight and T-joint connectors.  The PVC pipe slides together easily and the kids had fun assembling and reassembling the shooters in different configurations.

 

For some kids, using the shooters was secondary to eating marshmallows.

 

Gibson got to blow out more candles at his party.  Gibson was delighted with his birthday.  He's been looking forward to turning 5 for a long time.  He's now old enough to have monthly interviews with Brandan.  Brandan meets with the kids individually each month to talk, make goals and plan rewards.

We had the missionaries to dinner this week and Brandan taught them how to make crepes, one of his specialities.

 

This was the second week of Spring Break for our kids.  Sofi and her friends spent a lot of the week working on a movie for a school competition.  She and her friend, Joey, have been working for weeks on the script.  The kids met early in the week to read through the script and plan out how to film the movie.

The rules for the competition require the movie to be entirely filmed within 48 hours of beginning.  The kids spent Thursday and Friday filming.  You can get the general idea of the movie from the photo below.  The working title for the film was "The Taken," but after radical script changes during filming, it may need a new name.  We think the film's genre is probably post-apocalyptic comedy.

It wasn't all parties and playing the past week.  Becky made sure the kids had a checklist every day with chores, math worksheets, brain teasers and practicing music.  Our kids think they're the only ones who have to work during Spring Break.

Our week ended with our semi-annual General Conference feast, a spiritual and physical event.  Sofi combined her breakfast Saturday morning with our General Conference candy game and came up with peanut butter/m&m pancakes.  She recommends the combination.  We can't believe conference is already over.  Luckily, the talks are already available on lds.org and we can repeat all our favorites: Elder Wilson, Elder Anderson, President Uchtdorf, Elder Scott, Elder Koelliker, Elder Nelson, President Monson. . .