Ice Age reprise

This has to be one of the kids most favourite ever things to do. I like to take my time and set it up over a few days. I add about a inch of water each day and a few dinosaurs and a different colour of food colouring. One day I'm going to be super flash and chill the water right down to almost freezing so the colours don't mix at all. I also read that if you make ice with boiling water you get ice that is really clear with none of the bubbling of regular ice- I want to try that as well.

Usually we use hammers to smash the ice and get the dinosaurs out but this time I showed Will how to use salt and some warm water to see the effect the salt had - (it makes the ice melt faster).

I also added some of the crystal soil balls to the ice to see what would happen when you freeze them. I think the freezing process does something to their molecular structure because they totally disintegrate when defrosted! It makes for a cool decoration on the lawn though. Especially a week later when you've forgotten they are there and it rains and they get all expanded again.

When the ice block got down to small multiple pieces we but them in a bowl of water and Tama had a great time messing around in there while Will took the blocks with dinosaurs still entombed and tried to smash them out on the pavers.

  

How cool do those ice layers look!!??

I love this activity for so many reasons. It's totally free to set up, you can do it over and over again. It is interesting and heaps of fun. It keeps them engaged and entranced for a long time. It doesn't have any age limitations. It has built in science concepts. And he kids LOVE doing it.  Oh and did I mention- it's totally fun!
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Will 55 Months

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365 Week 26

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I'm writing a life...

I'm writing a list of all the things I want to do. Blogging is right near the very top. It would be at the top but I owe my Nana a letter and there are some things that just need to come first. (Shhhh don't tell her I wrote this post ok?). But the list is not all I'm writing.

“The creative mind plays with the objects it loves.”
-Carl Jung

 This quote came to me via email at the start of July. I hung on to it because I need to be reminded. Reminded that my creative mind is doing shit-all and that's why I'm slowly going bonkers.

Oh my goodness I never realised just how much of my sanity hung on getting to write and make and do. And just how frustrating it is when my time is consumed by life, my habits are poor (non-existant), and I feel I'm producing nothing. It makes my heart tight. It gives me a little nausea. And it leaves me composing blog posts to myself at 4am in the morning when my time would be better spent sleeping. It feels like it has been years since I sat here and wrote from my heart. Wrote the funny stories. Wrote the hard stories.


Then I read this post by The Worlds Strongest Librarian (TWSL) and it totally got me excited! I emailed the link to a friend who I knew would 'get' it and be able to discuss. And then something came up and I got too busy and forgot, till just now. In the post Josh (TWSL) asks:
            

"Are you living the story you imagined?  Do you still imagine?"

I find the concept of my life as a story really exciting. It's strange actually that I never thought of it like this before. I mean lets face it I am my family's story teller! 

If my life is a story- and lets face it- it has the makings of an epic: Romance, tragedy, adventure and a damn lot of comedy. Then I'm creating everyday. 

From the moment I wake up each morning I am crafting a life well lived. Everyday my creative mind has the opportunity to play with an object that I love- my life. Some days I don't love it- but it's all part of the story. And if it's not a life well-lived then I have the opportunity to rewrite, to edit and recreate, re-imagine every day- every moment really. How cool is that?!

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Shhhh... I'm hiding

There's halo around the moon tonight, it's beautiful. I wonder if you can see it in New Zealand. Probably not. Too many clouds I expect. Not a problem we often have here in Western Australia.

The children are asleep. Finally.

The TV is streaming the hopes and dreams of thousands of sports men and women to two empty couches.

Les is taking a long time to do a job across town. I wonder if perhaps he's had an accident. I often worry that he'll go and leave me. Wonder what I'll do. What would be best. What would even be possible. In reality he's probably talking gliding with a kindred spirit about to embark on his own journey in the hopes of sporting glory as Les did 2 year ago.

If we win the lottery in the next few days Les will take a trip to South Africa. The F3J worlds are on and he'd happily be a bag boy for anyone who would take him if he could just get there. It'd fill his tank with all the goodness he's been missing since we left the green flying fields of home.

My tank is empty. And it seems that despite that it's still being sucked dry. That's why I am hiding.

I got here. I worked. I 'built' our nest, I feathered it. And then I went looking for kindred spirits to come and play.

I thought I found them. My Aussie Carolann. My Australian Miss Wendy, and an Ocker Jozlyn.

I was excited, exhilarated. Like a girl with a crush. 

Stupid. Silly me. These things are irreplaceable. 

Instead they were imposters. Some did not follow through. Empty promises. They were the 'good' ones. The worst sucked me dry. Problems and trauma and troubles. I have enough of my own.

I don't mind listening, but I need to be heard as well. There should be 'give' if there is to be 'take'.

And so I'm hiding.

But perhaps not, hiding. Maybe choosing. Choosing not to just accept anything. Choosing to wait, wait for better things.

And maybe I can see them in the haze of the horizon. Like a dawning day. A glimmer, the first break of light is an impromptu call for cupcakes. A five minute conversation at the school gates after the 9 o'clock bell rings, where woes and celebrations are poured equally from weary hearts, is sweet like a birds early morning call.

I don't know, I guess friends are like Speights and Mainland Cheese.

She's a hard road finding the perfect woman. These things take time.

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Simple Sunday

By Julee Tilman at Poetic Artistry

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Single Photo Saturday

Check out the TV in the background- How's that for timing?

Flora on Friday

 

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40 Today!

Happy Birthday Les!

 

 

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Simple Sunday

 Source Unknown- please let me know if you deserve the credit for this one.

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Single Photo Saturday

Flora on Friday

 

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Autmn Activities

We actually don't have a whole heap of really obvious Autumn signs around where we live as the vast majority of our neighbourhood trees are Eucalypts. But we recently went on a mission to see what we could find and managed to come home with a few different autumn leaves.

Before we left we read a poem about Autumn leaves and talked about what we needed to look for and the difference between evergreens and deciduous trees.

When we got home we used the leaves we found to make some leaf print art.

 

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Dinosaur Stuff

I have been trying my hardest to loosely plan some structured activities for Will on his non-kindy days. I find it makes the day go much faster and easier and it improves his behaviour overall. A couple of weeks back we did some dinosaur work. We chose 20 Dinosaurs and did some classification: Carnivores and Herbivores, Colours, and (in the picture) smallest to biggest.

We also used some more of our foam art and some other collage materials to make a dinosaur environment picture and Will cut out a dino skeleton pieced it together and coloured it in.

 

Good stuff!

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