A Hair Raising Experience

Yesterday Claire had a day off school and her top request was a trip to the Science Museum. We had a great time.

Claire was finally brave enough to try the electric experiments and have her hair stand on end. She couldn't stop talking about it!

We spent lots of time in the gadgets room today. Learning about pulley's, gears and robots.
We saw a really cool chemistry show with explosions and fireballs! It was awesome, we can't wait to take Dad to that show.

More from the gadgets room.

Robots at work.

Finally, what could be cooler than a game of rat basketball! The rats dunk baskets to get a cheerio fed to them. Both girls thought it was great and even fed the rats (germ killer - stat!). Glad they liked it - mom didn't.

It is fun to have a day off school once in a while!

Fall Fun

This weekend we did lots of fun stuff. We had nice weather so we decided to get out and enjoy it. First up we met our friends at the apple orchard to pick some apples. With our help the bucket was filled in no time - 26lbs of apples!

Everybody say Apple!

Best to sample 2 or 3 while in the field.

Good thing we brought the wagon to lug them all back since the best apples were at the back of the orchard!

We also visited the Fall Festival at the zoo this weekend. They had lots of fun crafts, critters and learning activities for us. We made paper flowers, picture frames and saw lots of animals. Claire even got to participate in a magic trick which was really cute - she loved it!

Now to relax and bake some apple crisp!

Entomology Class With Dad

On Sunday, mom got to go get caught up on her scrap-booking. So we got to play with dad. He's not much into coloring though. He says he's been that way ever since his teacher scrawled "MESSY" over top of his interpretive rendering of prehistoric dinosaurs.

So, we got to play science class again. You may recall previously we studied a bumble bee. Today's subject in entomology class was a spider. I had wanted dad to just kill it, but when he suggested we could look at it under a microscope, I couldn't resist.

First task was to capture it. Here I have it safely secured in our tupperware coffin. Sorry little guy. After a quick freeze we were able to mount him under the microscope.



Check out his eyes. I counted eight, but dad wasn't sure if they were all eyes or not.



I really wanted to see his butt.. This is where he spins the webs from.



Dad wanted to check out his fangs. Unfortunately the pointy bits are hidden in his mouth. I'm glad I'm not a fly, and on the receiving end of those.



After Sarah woke up, she got to have her turn as well. Some of her pictures turned out better.





Actually I'm glad that Dad's teacher wrote messy all over his school work. If she hadn't I probably wouldn't have got to do cool stuff like this.