This blog chronicles the miracles and struggles of our daughters, Emily and Olivia. Emily was born 15 weeks early and had many complications, but she continues to amaze us! Olivia, born in China with heart complications, is also beating the odds. She joined her forever family (us!) when she was four years old and has been doing wonderfully! UPDATE: We started homeschooling August 2009 :)

Wednesday, October 14, 2009

Rock candy and tea parties

In science we learned about evaporation and made our own colorful sugar (i.e. rock candy!) by adding food coloring to sugar and water...and waiting a few days for the water to evaporate.

Today Olivia had a tea party for all her dolls and apparently invited Chelsea to join. In spite all the thrilling imaginary food, Chelsea fell fast asleep right on top of some dishes and with the side of her head nestled in glass bowl! Doesn't look too comfortable, but I guess she didn't want to miss a party!

Evaporation helped us to make our own rock candy!



Imaginary food just didn't keep Chelsea's interest!

Signing the Declaration of Independence...and Chelsea

Last week we made our own ink out of berries and used feathers to make our own writing quill! We even pretended we were part of the Continental Congress and signed the Declaration of Independence agreeing that we wanted to be free of that pesky king across the ocean.

Oh, and yes, Chelsea is still hanging in there :) Still not sure what happened that one night last month when I thought she was a goner, but she's back to her her 'ole self. And yes, I mean old. At 15, she's not as spry as she was just a year ago, but she still does the stairs and runs along the fence barking at our neighbor's dogs. And she still puts up with the girls who always want to play with her :)

Even Dad got in on writing with a feather! We cut the tips off at an angle, cleaned them out with a tooth pick and cut a slit in the tip to help control the ink. Our homemade berry ink was pretty red (too many strawberries and not enough blueberries?), but surprisingly it was gray when it dried.

Here, Olivia was proud to show off her own "John Hancock" on a copy of the Declaration of Independence for her notebook.
In spite of Olivia's choice of footwear, we do NOT have snow here...yet! It is chilly though!
Chelsea, being a good sport!

Apple Picking and Crazy Hair

We're really enjoying our homeschool co-op and getting to know some new friends better. Here are some pix our co-op field trip to an apple orchard...and the apple pie we made :)




Mom's lame attempt at crazy hair for Crazy Hair Day at co-op. Emily had that slept-in-wet-hair look that was matted, tangled and wild...but had calmed down by this point in the day. Olivia and I just went for the pony-tails-all-over look. Needless to say our hairdos did not win us any of the coveted prizes, but we had fun anyway. Anyone have any good crazy hair ideas?
Yum! Homemade apple pie!