the rest of February 2016

This month we had a music recital for Mattie and Pierce.We have friends who teach their kids music also and got together with us so the kids can get a little experience performing. Pierce did a great job - he played a Nocturne by Chopin:

And he played a version of "Stars" from Les Miserables that he's been working on for months and months. (He actually worked on it so much that he got himself twisted around a little, a horrible irony that someones comes from lots of practice, but you can see that he recovers well here.) He was much relieved when this was over and I think he did a wonderful job.

 This was really Mattie's first foray back into the world of playing the violin since her surgery. She did a great job! She says it feels weird but she can do it.

Another really exciting thing that happened this month is that Matt sold an art piece! He actually traded it with a lady he found who had a kiln she wanted to sell for $300, but he feels the kiln (and his art) are worth more. He had to drive to the other side of the mountain to deliver his metal lady, dig a hole and heave around a big rock etc., but came home happy and pleased.

It's a little hard to see the depth in this because he has two layers of the rings, but we tried to do a quick job of photographing it here:









This is a library by Zoe's school - we love the metal art sculpture and took a picture to show Matt. What a great idea at a library.


Here is a pipe necklace that Zoe made that needed to be immortalized. Also you can see that Zoe got glasses this month. Finally! She's been waiting forEVER to get glasses, and she loves them.


And here are her cute fingers and toes, fancied up at her friend Bella's spa birthday party. So fun! I feel like half of the pictures on my phone are of her fingernails or hair, a quick picture taken before they get messed up.

Zoe's Magic Shell inquiry

This month Zoe needed to whip out a quick Inquiry project for school. (That's a joke - inquiry projects are never quick.) She decided that she was interested in how Magic Shell separates, so we put some in a test tube and waited to see how long it would take. The first test tube is regular store-bought Magic Shell, the second tube is some homemade Magic Shell (very easy to make by the way), and the third tube is some store-bought Magic Shell that we'd had in the cupboard for awhile that had crushed pretzels in it (and was impossible to pour basically from day 1.)

In the first picture here we had waited more than a day, and the only Magic Shell that had separated at all was the one on the left, and only 2mm. Zoe had been taking pictures every 10 minutes for hours... hoping that something would happen, but even after waiting overnight we felt like these results were just not enough.


We had to be writing up her results almost immediately, so we did a little bit of panicking and decided to see how else we could get Magic Shell to separate. Here is a homemade centrifuge that we'd had high hopes for.


Matt hooked up a contraption with a drill to help her spin it really fast. But - not fast enough - it just mixed the Magic Shell and didn't separate it at all.


Next we tried heat. The blow dryer was not enough to do much, plus it was going to take a million years to do anything, so we put it in the oven at 200 degrees.




And it worked! Hooray! Store-bought Magic shell easily separated after hours in the oven, and the homemade sort expanded and separated in a different way and also overflowed so we couldn't measure it. But - enough success to write up. Whew.


Meanwhile, Mattie attended her Winter Ball dance for school. She went with a group of friends and had a great time. Doesn't she look pretty?

Las Vegas tournament - the aftermath

I would reallllllllly like to use this format to keep up with what we've done over the month. Maybe this month will be the start of a great record.

Matt took Pierce and Zoe on a road trip to Las Vegas, NV, where Pierce had a soccer tournament. They had a great time (maybe I can get the pictures Matt took off his phone). But sadly, Zoe left her special blanket in the hotel room in Vegas, and even though it was OBVIOUSLY special, the housekeeping service must have thrown it away because even though I called several times, they never "found" it. (We suspect it did not look like something that someone would purposely save.)

Anyway, one thing that has helped a very sad Zoe is to get some new fabric to make another Baby Bay-bay. It's not as good, and of course there's no finding that fabric again, but I let her choose fabric at the store and we made a little blanket for her to snuggle. She did really enjoy the process of choosing fabric.

Zoe's reasons for American Independence

Zoe's class is working on social studies this year, and they have had two projects. The first time, they could choose between making a brochure about American colonization, or making a video. She wisely chose to make a brochure. For the second project she got to do that video after all. So here she is, singing a song that we wrote about why the Americans need to declare independence from the British.