Muffin Tins, That Big Box & Animal Adventures

Approximately a month ago a large, eagerly anticipated box arrived. Heavily laden with books and educational tools from the States it sat alone, and unopened until last night when the children and I gathered to do the honors. While a few of the so called tools were highly overpriced an seriously disappointing the vast majority of things I can hardly wait to get stuck into and apparently neither can the kids who sat happily watching a DVD of science experiments while lunching on an assortment of nibbles, served up in a muffin tin. Ruhi insisted that we try the first experiment ourselves. Who am I to refuse? So I gathered an assortment of containers and filled each with exactly the same amount of water (tinted with food coloring) and asked the girls to guess which one they thought was the fullest. Here they are pointing to their different choices. Both gave different reasons for why they chose the way that they did and both were surprised to learn that the water was the same for every container. The experiment needs to be followed up by them each getting a chance to measure out for themselves using different containers, but we were distracted when we discovered Archimedes principle about water displacement. That was fun. Messy, but fun. We've saved the measuring for another day.

Late in the afternoon I took the kids to quickly visit Lynda (the llama) and Sparkles (formerly known as Alice - the pony). It had been awhile and after helping make a large batch of carrot and apple juice Anisa became nostalgic and begged to go see them again. They had a great time feeding them leftover apple and cucumber slices although Sparkles was as grabby as ever and barely gave Lynda a chance to sample the portions thrown her way.

I couldn't help but notice there was something different about Lynda. I am not entirely convinced that she (???) is the same llama we have previously visited. It has been a long week and I could be slightly delusional but I was quite certain that the original Lynda had one blue eye and one brown one. I took a closeup shot intending to verify it later. I still have not had a chance. At any rate the Lynda we saw yesterday had two beautiful, blue eyes.

While Ruhi noticed a couple of kangaroos engaged in what appeared to be a serious boxing competition (not a very clear picture, but you get the idea), Anisa attempted to style Sparkles hair and did all manner of interesting things with her fringe (bangs). Meanwhile Bayan just loved it all. As he stopped by this tree he flashed the biggest grin at the camera... it was gorgeous, priceless and missed (by about a nanosecond) this is the slightly cross eyed shot I got instead. Oh well. He is still entirely charming.