Party Prep

First off, this is the crystal tree after three days.  It is looking great!  Levi checks it every morning first thing.  The Dolomite/Vinegar experiment is a complete failure and the rock looks exactly the same.  I think it is supposed to grow crystals on it from the vinegar but, so not happening at the moment.  At least the crystal tree is working and that keeps him going at the moment.

Tonight was soccer night and it was cold and raining on and off but it doesn't stop the kids happily running around for two hours.  After the practice, the coach came back shaking his head and laughing.  He said that last week, they were all so tired, he had to keep waking them up and doing very active things so they stayed on task.  Tonight he was checking for a full moon!!  The kids were all scatty and if there had been walls to bounce off out there, they would have been bouncing repeatedly!

 sThen we got home and Jo had finished the party bags!  Because it is a caveman theme, we wanted to have bags to take home that reflected that.  Jo volunteered to make the bags out of 'tiger skin'.  The tiger skin was a velour rug that I had bought from Kmart for $20.  Jo cut it into big pieces and folded them in half and sewed the edges.  Levi has been bugging me since the weekend to fill the bags even though they hadn't even been made yet.  Tonight I could finally let him at it.  The tiles on the floor were perfect for making little piles for each bag.  Levi had a blast sorting out all the contents and then he put it all into bags.  We put the bags into a laundry basket to wait, but I have to add a few chocolates first before we tie up the top with string (Assuming string was made in caveman times).  Given that I have morphed dinosaurs in there as well, I guess there is a large number of epochs represented in this party, all named 'caveman'! 

Tonight Levi was a bit tired but I guess he had enough of an excuse with two hours of soccer!

Making a Cave

Today was an interesting one!  It started, well, poorly is am understatement.  Pretty much, my back decided that I wasn't looking after it and decided to spasm right up, starting at about 4am.  So the first night in forever that Levi slept in and I was up at 4am.  One of these days the sleeping patterns in this house will sync and that will be a miracle!  I know that pretty much, the best option for back pain like mine today is just to take pain relievers and try to do normal things. I had so much planned for the day there wasn't a big chance to sit around and sitting was pretty painful anyway! By tonight I am feeling much better and am not counting the minutes to the next pain reliever! I think that I will be much better tomorrow and maybe fixed entirely.  I figure that if I believe it strongly (?blindly) enough, it will come true! 

So after the standard Sunday morning homework session, we made crystals.  There were a bunch of experiments that came in an over sized test tube from Scholastic at school.  One of them involved making up a paper Christmas tree and putting it in water with dissolved crystals in it.  The water is pulled up and then the crystals form on the branches.  It starts off as white paper but Levi decided to put food coloring into the water, which is an even better effect because the tree goes blue but the crystals stay white over the top!

Then Levi went to Ty's and I worked on his party again.  This time I worked on the cave.  We are doing cave paintings.  So I put up newspaper in the crawl space wall and then spray painted it brown and red brown.  On the day of the party I will hang something on the air conditioner to hide it and then it will completely be a 'cave'.  I have painted three canvas' and will put them over the spray painted wall for the kids to do their paintings!

Levi is having fun with writing now, after all that time of me worrying about if it would ever happen!  He wrote this sign for the outside of our door.  I am loving that he is getting better at spelling faster than even I could have hoped for.  I am loving that but at the same time I am going to be a little sad when he starts to give me notes that are correct in every way.  I am going to miss 'parswerd' instead of 'password'.  True to form the password was 'explode'.  It really makes you think about how exactly that you say things, because the spelling of everything around here is very phonetic and very sound based.  I better be careful!