Attitude

In my continuing efforts to improve my face painting techniques, I have started developing more complicated designs.  Dragons and animals are next, with Celtic knots and tribal patterns at the end.  Symmetry and proportionality are difficult for body art.  Star has graciously agreed to be my test canvas.  She was particularly pleased with how this dragon turned out.  I'm particularly pleased with the picture.  To me it looks like a one in a thousand picture that really captures the spirit of the moment.

snip snip

At the risk of excessively repeating content, I want to tell you about a lovely piece of free stuff from Girl Genius.  The folks over there have provided some supplemental freebies, including some great paper doll patterns.  I’ve made paper dolls with the kids before, as part of activity box shenanigans, but I wasn’t sure how they would react to these.  Nonetheless, we decided to print them out and give it a try. 

One of the obvious problems with paperdolls is how flimsy they are.  Since actual lamination is not available to us, we went a bit MacGyver and used clear packing tape.  This turned out to be an excellent idea because we can attach the accessories to the dolls without using the tabs, greatly extended lifespan and making them easier to cut out.

The kiddos enjoyed playing with them on the first day, but the real winner came the next day.  As is their wont, the kids came bounding into our bed at 6:30am.  Not long after, Star said: “Hey, let’s go play with the paper dolls!”  Dandelion immediately agreed and off they scampered.

Not only are these things fun and cool, they also provided me an additional five minutes of sleep.  What more could you want?

Ha

My six year old at the breakfast table today:

"My nose is a volcano of goop!"

=)

Worries

Today, I noticed this headline:

Pediatricians call for a choke-proof hot dog

I thought that would make a great idea for creating product that would do something useful (reduce harm) and quite likely also be profitable. Then I read this part of the story:

"More than 10,000 children under 14 go to the emergency room each year after choking on food, and up to 77 die, says the new policy statement..."

Ummm, the fatality risk is .77%? Mind you, this is for incidents which actually end up in the emergency room. Presumably, a choking incident that gets resolved at home doesn’t result in such a trip, make the rate even more skewed. Obviously, we don’t want to have preventable harm going on, but we don’t have infinite resources to reduce harm, and must stack rank what we will try and prevent. Typically, we would do that by looking at impact of the event, risk of occurrence, and cost of countermeasures.

"No parents can watch all of their kids 100% of the time," Smith says. "The best way to protect kids is to design these risks out of existence."

Uhhh, no. Is this really the level of risk we should be taking seriously? When I look at this math, this particular risk drops waaaay down the list. I particularly enjoyed the obligatory quote-from-industry-giant at the bottom of the article:

"As a mother who has fed toddlers cylindrical foods like grapes, bananas, hot dogs and carrots, I 'redesigned' them in my kitchen by cutting them with a paring knife until my children were old enough to manage on their own,"

Sing it sister!

Work in progress

I have decided that I would like to learn face painting.  It is just the sort of thing that kids like.  Since I hang around with kids quite a bit, it is sure to come in handy.  My first attempts have been with watercolors, but recently MA was able to find me some real facepaint.  This weekend I made my first attempt with the new materials.

Photo #1:  Captain Intensio at work

Photo #2:  The results

Rugby players as car mechanics

What does an alternator do?

Ah weekends! Shall I ever get enough?

We had such an enriching weekend in Beirut!  We started with a family science activity to help build a strong understanding of the scientific method and foster an interest in the world around them.  Each kid had a small notepad to serve as their science journal.  I had packed bread and sliced turkey to serve as bait, a few clear jars, and other general use adventure items.  Off we went to our nearby and dearly loved Corniche to explore.  We were hoping for some fish, but the tides were wrong for that. 

Our first subject was a jelly fish.  I am fairly confident that it was already dead, but trying to tell the difference between a living and dead jelly fish is not something I can do beyond the level of: "Is it moving at this particular second?"

We recorded this is in our science journals. 

Based on our observations, we concluded that Jellyfish do not have bones, and if it was taken out of the water, it would likely squish down flat.  All-in-all, we decided not to test this hypothesis due to risk to the subject, and poisoning risk to the assistant (me).

Next, we explored the plentiful tide pools.  To set a baseline, we careful observed the natural environment, to try and determine what we could infer about the creates from the resources they needed. 

 

 

Some patience brought us to be able to spot a couple of very small hermit crabs.  Time for a lesson on camoflage!

I had hoped to be able to catch a larger-size reef crab, but no luck.  Based on our observations, crabs of this species can not be effectively lured into colanders by slices of turkey. 

Publication of these results is pending peer review. =)

We did find a sea snail, and observed that it moves so slowly, seaweed can grow on its back.  We hypothesized that a creature with many legs (the crab) would be likely to be faster than a creature with one leg (the snail).

Next trip, I shall show them that this observation doesn't scale (millipedes).


It was a really fun way to get out, explore our natural world and learn the scientific method.

As an aside, most of the pictures on this post were actually taken by my oldest daughter (6).  The pictures we parents took didn't come out very well.