Tulips and spring rain

I think I like tulips best when they are starting to fade.

I like how their bright colors deepen and turn to jewel tones and how their petals curl.

Clover Yard

Visitor on our back door

Spring in my little yard

Our apartment actually looks quite pretty right now - the trees are in full bloom and the bulbs I planted in the fall all came up!  They are just a few pockets of color, but it's something, and it helps me feel like this place is my own for this time.

The irises are from Medford, and one little grape hyacinth hitched a ride along with them!  

There hardly any grass in our little yard, but the clover is happily growing in

Tabitha was kind enough to pose for me, but was quickly distracted...

by Beatrice, who had discovered the tear in the screen door!

Chemistry Class

Science is one of our favorite subjects.  I am so incredibly glad that Elsa and Nora are finding it as interesting as I do!  We've focused this semester on chemistry, to follow along with our Classical Conversations (CC) memory work for this term.  We do a lot of experiments on our own, and get together every few weeks with another family to do some together.  I was honored to get to help teach the weekly science lesson and experiment at our CC group too, and it became a huge blessing to me to get to do something outside our house and to share something I love with the rest of our group.  

Here are a few of our favorites that we've done at home:

We studied surface tension with food coloring and dish soap,

and made our cardboard "boat" zoom across the pan of water when the dish soap "broke" the surface tension and the water molecules "snapped" apart:

We used household liquids to make a density column (the girls loved dropping a variety of objects in it to see where they settled in the column, e.g. a little plastic toy floated between the water and the oil, but a bit of crayon was more dense than even the honey and sunk to the bottom)

We've used weak acids to clean pennies (essentially stripping off layers of copper),

and then watched as a steel nail (originally silver looking. on top) attracted the copper atoms and ended up plated with copper (bottom).  I felt like an alchemist, trying to turn things into gold!

Also, thanks to our Medford neighbor, Connie (Thank You!!!) we've been growing crystals and talking about how atoms are arranged in different types of matter.

With our friends we talked about reactions,

and experimented with covering a candle with a jar and counted to see how long it would take it to go out.  If we removed the oxygen from the jar first (using it up with another flame), then the candle went out right away!

Or most exciting experiment so far combined nucleation (bubbles forming, Mentos + diet Coke) with density (Mentos sink to the bottom of the bottle, seeding bubbles the whole way down), and surface tension (it is hypothesized that since diet Coke has a lower surface tension than other sodas, due to the aspartame, it foams more easily) - 6 Mentos on a diet Coke = a bubble geyser!  (I love the little girls' expressions, and Joel's :)

Finally, I don't want to leave out the baby.  Beatrice is becoming quite the little exploring scientist herself (don't worry, the beaker and flask are perfectly clean :)

Oak Mountain State Park

Often when Joel can take some time off on a Saturday I find some new place for us to explore.  I had heard of a petting farm at one of the local parks, so we pulled out the picnic basket for a lunch by the lake before feeding the animals in the barnyard.  

I thought it was sunny that Nora has the same silly face in both these pictures!  The girls loved poking around by the lake and watching the groups kayaking and fishing.

Then on to the Big Red Barn.

Even though we frequented a farm in Medford where we bought our milk, the novelty of petting and feeding animals never seems to wear off for our girls.  There were lots of baby goats to pet, which delighted Nora,

and there was one very bold and determined, but thankfully gentle, donkey:

The ducks, who were not officially part of the petting farm, benefited from the abundance of food pellets dropped by eager hands.

Tables are turning

Nana usually reads to the girls a lot when she visits and the girls love it.  But now when Nana visits, Elsa can read to her!