Never, never, never

I love pieces of advice that start with "Never". I always have.
When I was a teenager I worked in a retirement home.
A lady there used to say: "Never marry a man you meet in church".
Here's one from my friend Kelvin: "Never refuse a cup of tea".
From our builder: "Never ask a plumber to cut wood".
My Dad used to say: "Never explain, never apologise, and never do anything for anyone". This was rather funny because he frequently explained, apologised when necessary, and constantly did things for everybody.
From Simon: "Never eat something that's larger than your head".
And from Me: "Never miss an opportunity to show off your latest robot".

Have you got any "Never" advice? Please share.

This is a robot hijack

Sometimes when I'm making a robot a small person appears at my side saying "Can that be my robot Mum? Please? Pretty please with sugar on the top and hundreds and thousands and chocolate chips?". Well I'm a soft touch for any request sprinkled with chocolate chips so I almost always say yes.
The small folks are so hilarious in how they want their special robot decorated. It's always the biggest, craziest buttons from my button box, and they're not especially into dials and screens or other controls. Just big vintage buttons that make rather eccentric control panels and very spooky eyes, once you sew them on.

I'm perfectly happy to sacrifice the odd robot to their quirky requests, especially if it means they write great stories about them at school like this:

A robot and a person falling in love...sigh, what a sweet idea. I can feel a puppet show coming on starring Spooky Robot and Barbie. She's got to be good for something.

Experiment 2. An acid plus a base

Science for preschoolers and small children, (cont). Here's an easy one that you can do in 3 min. Baking soda plus vinegar gives loads and loads of fizzy bubbles.

This "science trick" loosely demonstrates that sometimes, mixing two substances together gives a reaction. If you like, you can start off with some other mixtures that don't give a reaction, just to hammer the point.

For example:

If you mix sand and water nothing happens.

If you mix water and sugar the sugar dissolves, but that's all.

If you mix baking soda and vinegar, you get loads of fizzy bubbles, wow!

We played around with this for about 20 minutes, working out how much we baking soda we could put in the glass without the bubbles fizzing over. In the end we came up with 1 t baking soda and 1/4 c white vinegar.

The chemical reaction here, in case you're interested, is that mixing an acid with a base gives a salt plus water. A byproduct of this reaction is the production of carbon dioxide, which is given off by the baking soda as the acids rip off their hydroxyl group. My kids don't care about that part, and it would kill the fun if I started going on about that anyway. This science trick is all about noticing a reaction occurring.

Okay, that was fun. But do you want to see it in slow motion? Lets use vinegar to react with a different base: an egg shell. The egg shell is made of an alkaline calcium compound. If we drop an egg into some vinegar and leave it a while, the vinegar will dissolve that shell clean off, leaving a funny wobbly shell-less egg.

Here goes: Get a load of this! As soon as you cover the egg in vinegar there are zillions of little bubbles forming. That's the carbon dioxide again, being produced as the acid reacts with the base. All those bubbles make the egg float. It's like watching a lava lamp as it bobs to the top of the jar. The shell starts to dissolve off in layers, see?

After a day, we washed off the last bits of the shell under the tap. It was soft and chalky and washed off with no problem at all. We all held the wobbly shell-less egg.

If you think the kids look a little underwhelmed it's because they are. "That's kind of disgusting Mum", said Harry.

Well, yes it is I guess. Perhaps this is also a lesson in how we do not like it when people use chemicals to mess with our food.

Me: "Yes it's funny to see an egg without a shell. But isn't it cool that the vinegar dissolved the shell off?

Harry: "Um...well I just don't know."

Experiment 1. Plants having a drink

Harry is now 6 and is busy planning a career. He wants to be a scientist when he grows up. Even though I used to be a scientist, I would like to say straight away that he didn't get this ambition from me. When he told me his plan, my mind started to launch into a diatribe about the pitfalls of being a scientist for a living. My brain was rattling on about how you think you're going to do something useful in the world but in the end you just end up compromising your ethics by working with big business, who don't give a toss about making the world a better place but only care about money. Thankfully my mouth ignored my brain and said "Yes I can see that you love to find out how things work, and that's what scientists do."
Anyway, he has been begging for science "tricks", so I'm aiming to do one a week or so, just for fun. You will all be tortured with the details, nyah ha ha!

Experiment 1. Plants having a drink.

Background: This is more of an observation than an experiment. It shows how plants drink water.

You will need: Some flowers- white flowers are best; Food colouring. We used blue, red, and yellow, and plain water as the 'control'; Some glasses or jars and some water.

1. Pick the flowers and put them in a glass with some water at the bottom. Add some food colouring to the water- I used quite a lot so that you can see the colours clearly in the petals.
2. Check back over the next couple of hours to see the coloured water start to move through the plants. These flowers had colour at the tips of the petals after only 1 hour. The colours deepened and spread over the following day.

We chatted about what we saw happening. Things that the kids noticed were that it was harder to see the yellow (so we talked about contrasting colours), that the colour was first visible at the tips of the petals (so they drink right up to the top Mum!), that the colours are in stripes (the veins are parallel in these flowers). We also noticed that some of the petals were barely coloured at all. Why is that? I'm guessing that these petals will be the first to fall off, and they didn't show the colour because the plant has already started shutting off those veins. I have no idea if I'm right about that or not. When we looked closely we noticed that the middle of the daisy was showing the colour too, right to the tops of the stamens. Rather pretty I thought.

ANZACs

Good morning, would you like an anzac biscuit?

I love anzacs. I feel very patriotic when I make them. The story goes that concerned Mums sent their lads tins of these biscuits during the first world war- does anyone know if that's actually true? I want to believe it.

Whatever their history, they are very delicious. I made a double batch yesterday so we could give some to a kind Mum at school who gave us their family's old spiderman dress-ups, and keep some for ourselves. The chocolate icing squiggle on the top of each one is a contemporary development, not part of the original recipe but everything's better with a little choc, don't you think?

I feel a recipe coming on:

ANZAC biscuits- a traditional NZ treat to be enjoyed with a cup of tea

1 C plain flour

1 C dessicated coconut

1 C rolled oats

2/3 C sugar

125 g butter

1/4 c golden syrup

1/2 t baking soda dissolved in 1 T boiling water

Mix together the dry ingredients. Melt the butter and golden syrup together, then add the baking soda dissolved in water. The mixture will fizz up straight away. Add to the dry ingredients and mix well. Place small balls on a baking tray, flatten them a little, then bake for 15 minutes at 180 degrees C until golden brown. Your entire house will have a delicious rolled oaty goldensyrupy hokey pokey biscuity smell, and this means they're ready. Ice when cold with chocolate icing, if that's your thang.

Feelin gooooooood

Remember how I started knitting some socks a while back?

They were going to be my quick-knit project, a wee thing to kick off winter and get my knitting fingers nimble and quick again. They were going to be a fun project that got me some super duper practical knitwear for myself. As well, turning the heel was going to be the thing that flexed my knitting muscles and demonstrated some knitting prowess.
Well, they took longer than I thought. And, what's more, it soon became clear that the wool was roguishly knitting itself into a man's sock, not a woman's sock. Hurrumph. The heel turning was very difficult, but I am rather churlishly blaming the crappy instructions (Spotlight, I cuss at your sock-yarn knitting instructions!). I messed up the heel three times on each sock! Three times for goodness sakes!
Anyway, I left them in a heap of 4 needles for a couple of months, and then came back to them in time for Simon's birthday a week or two ago. Don't his feet look handsome?

Wanna see some more? Go on Simon, lift up those jeans a little and show us some leg! I mean some sock.

And now I am among the knitters who have knitted a pair of socks. It feels gooooooooood.

Blankie

A recent score from one of the outbuildings on the farm: This knitted blankie.

It's a little larger than cot size, and is made from a series of knitted strips. There's so many things I love about this blanket; I love the colours in those bright stripes, I love the knitted texture and the handmade quality of it. Most of all, I love the resourcefulness that went into it. I suspect it was knitted from a heap of scraps. Some of those scraps must have been tiny- just look how small some of the stripes are, some of them are not even a row long.

There is a small hole, which I will repair. Through the hole there is a glimpse of an old blanket, to make this blanket warmer and give it some strength. Another thrilling re-use!

And the back of the blanket is this fantastic bark cloth. They just don't make them like this any more.

This blanket really got me thinking. Perhaps the person who made it really needed a blanket. Perhaps they really needed to use up those scraps. Who knows? But they spent hours and hours and hours making something out of things that most people would have sent to landfill. I love that.