Grow Fish!

This is the top of my stove (yeah, don't really look that closely, please!)

In the plastic dish, we are currently growing an orange dinosaur and two tropical fish. These are the little novelty items that you can put in water and they double, triple, NO! quadruple! in size before your very eyes!!!!

This, they have done. The package says that after 48 hours, you can take them out of the water and watch them shrink back down to normal, but Jabber doesn't think that sounds like a good idea. He swears that the creatures are still growing. So...there they sit. It's science, right?

Nothing Like a Good Cupcake!

Yesterday was one of those days where it rains pretty much constantly from morning until bedtime, and the kids spend the entire time bouncing off the walls like my house is an elaborate pinball machine with unlimited play.

As it is mid-August, I am nearly out of new and exciting ways to keep them from gouging each other's eyes out, and many activities I have found online take waaayy more time for the set-up and clean-up than my kiddos will actually spend on the activity. I mean, sure, they probably would have fun and learn things and have all their senses stimulated or whatever, but yikes. I may want to edit my novel or watch the Olympics or even something less productive than that.

My one idea that was actually kind of fun turned into a crazy mess. I put out a bunch of bowls, cups, and spoons, and then filled them with some old dried beans that have been in a jar in our cupboard for a couple of years now (don't ask me why they were there for that long because I really have no idea). This was great fun--pouring, scooping, stirring, sifting, and...flinging? Oh dear. Flinging.

In a matter of minutes, there is not a single square inch of my kitchen floor that is unoccupied by a little white bean. Monkey is squealing with glee. So I do what any good mother would do: I ignore it and let him continue. Then I initiate a contest to see who can put the most beans in his/her plastic cup in one minute. Then I try to ignore the fact that they are flinging again.

The sound of dried beans clattering around the kitchen floor--behind the stove, under the refrigerator--is like music to my sons' ears. Also? Dried beans actually hurt a little when stepped upon. Not necessarily as much as walking across the Matchbox Minefield of the living room, and of course it doesn't even begin to compare with stepping on a Lego at midnight on your way to the bathroom, but still. It is unpleasant.

An hour or so later, I finally have cleaned up the majority of the beans. The rest I'll leave alone until they sprout beneath the radiator. It will make for an interesting science lesson later.

So...we decided to bake cupcakes!

Both boys played a part in the making and decorating, and of course, the best part--eating!


Here is Jabber, who is showing his great maturity ("I am more than four and a half exactly," he informs anyone who says hello to him) by getting only minimal frosting on his face.

Monkey sporting a 'stache.
Funny stuff, this.

It was a long rainy day, but there's nothing like a good cupcake!

Teacher of the Year, Foiled Again!

Jabberwock is full of questions. Some of them are annoying, some of them are completely bizarre, and a good deal of them are about trying to figure out the way things work in this world. I try to answer him.

The last couple of weeks, we have been going for short hikes at a river near our home, and the questions have tended toward the scientific. In just the last week, we have had pretty in-depth conversations about evaporation/condensation (and the three states of matter), erosion, and then yesterday it was all about animal classification. Now I have always enjoyed biology--from the microscopic level right up to the cat dissection we did in advanced bio in high school. But this was the subject that stumped me, that made me say, "Gosh, Jabber, I just don't know. I guess we'll have to look that up."

OK, so from an educational standpoint, I know it's actually better for us to explore resources and learn the answers together, rather than a sort of Biology 101 lecture from the voice of Mom. Still, it irks me that I couldn't pull the answer out of my brain.

So we're sitting in the sandbox, and he asks me, "Mom, humans are mammals, right? So what makes us mammals?"

Yes! Easy question! I rattle off a bunch of characteristics of mammals, excited beyond all normal parameters that just yesterday we had been talking about animals being warm or cold-blooded. We chat for a while about animals giving birth to live young and then move on to discuss how mammals all feed their babies "nummies." Monkey joins the discussion at this point, lifting two sandy hands from his mud pie to caress my breasts.

"Nummie-nummie-nummie-num," he says solemnly. My shirt will never be the same.

"So, Jabber, can you think of any animals besides humans that would fit those characteristics? What other mammals are there?" I must be getting ready for school after all, hopping into Bloom's Taxonomy Mode while hanging out in the sandbox with a four-year-old.

He thinks for a minute. "A polar bear!" he shouts. "And a deer!"

We all applaud. It is quite exciting, let me tell you. I feel like science teacher of the year. And then.

"Are worms mammals?"

No. No, they are not. I am sure of that. He doesn't ask the next question: well, then, what ARE they? But I do. Come on, Science Teacher of the Freaking Year, what is a worm? My brain starts throwing words around, like Kingdom Phylum Class Order, or...damn, was it Order Class? Yeah, yeah. I dredge up an idea about five different groups of animals, but my brain can't fit worms into any of them.

Even though I don't have any idea how to fit a worm into my classification system, I start talking, trusting my Intro to Bio knowledge to show up when it really counts. "There are other groups of animals, too, besides Mammals," I say. "Like reptiles." Yeah, I am absolutely sure that's one of the groups. Is it a Kingdom? A Phylum? A Class, no Order?

"Dinosaurs were reptiles," says Jabber, full of wisdom.

"Yes, they were, but there are other animals that are reptiles, too, like turtles and snakes." Oh, I can feel that Best Teacher Tiara settling back onto my head now.

"Snakes?" asks Jabber.

"Nakes?" asks Monkey.

"Well, that's kind of like a worm," says Jabberwock. "So is a worm a reptile?"

Damn! "What is with you and worms?" No, I don't think I actually said that. "Well, there's Birds," I continue. I'm sure of birds. Mammals, Reptiles, Birds, and..."And amphibians, like frogs, that live on both water and land." Yep, I know that's one. I search through my brain for the fifth category. I know there's five; that number is clear in my memory, although I still can't remember what level of the taxonomy I am babbling about. I mean, one category can't include insects, worms, fish, and oh! there's a category that's like things with shells...crustaceans! Shit, this is too many categories. Suddenly, in my head, two Latin words compete: Annelida and Arthropoda. Annelids? Worms are Annelids! But...what about fish? What about the five categories?

"What is a worm?" He is pretty insistent at this point.

"Wom?" asks Monkey.

I sigh. "I don't know." I am defeated, vanquished by the natural sciences.

Come on, kid, ask me about poetry, plot structure, a vocabulary word?