The Blood Moon and the Solar Halo

Blood moon sighted at about 4:00am on 04/15/2014. You can see Mars to the right!

Solar Halo sighted on 04/16/2014. Breathtaking!

The fostering of *Brownie*

This is the little munchkin we tried to help. Hubby found him stranded after a storm and decided to bring him home. Kids named him brownie :) He was probably a week old when he got to us. 

A day later after feeding on softened cat food with a syringe. Go figure, bird eating cat food! 

 Getting stronger and full of feathers, a week later!

 Flying everywhere!

All set and ready to venture out in its natural habitat!

We miss you Brownie! I hope you are safe and enjoying the outdoors. It would be nice if you visit us, you know..

Hydroponic Farm: Strawberry Picking

We took the kids Strawberry picking and this time we headed to a Hydroponic Farm. It was a pretty unique experience! Hydroponics is a form of Agriculture where plants are grown without the use of Soil.  Instead, it used Mineral Nutrient in Water alone or in an inert medium, such as perlite, gravel, pebbles, coconut husk etc.

Wall of Honor!

Kids Wall of Honor! The picture speaks for itself. So proud of you all!

N's Science Fair Project

N's fifth grade Science Fair project.. WATTS UP, LIGHT BULB...
Her project was to compare the efficiency of different types of light bulbs in the market. She compared Halogen, Compact Flouroscent, Incandescent and LED.

And guess what? She stood 3rd. Place in her school! Way to go N!!

Soap Experiment

Pictures, explanation and experiment by N and R. Edited by truly yours. Here you go:

We did a little soap experiment today about "which soap floats and which sink". We used three different brands of soap. Irish spring, Ivory, and Dial. Here is what we came up with:

Dial:

 As soon as we put a bar of Dial in a container with warm water, it sank immediately.


 Irish spring:



Next, we decided to put a bar of Irish spring and that sank too.


Ivory



Last but not least, we put a bar of Ivory.. Hey! Ivory floats! Woohoo!

Since ivory is the only one that floats, we decided to do some research why that floats alone. We found out that the mixing process used in making Ivory soap adds air into the bar which reduces its density and thus make it less dense than water. Guess what that means.. you will never loose your bar of soap in your bubble bath when it slips off your hands..

Since we were at it, we decided to take it a notch up and did one more science experiment. We microwaved the bar of ivory on a  piece of waxed paper for about 90 seconds. Here is how it turned out:

Before:




After:




Huge different, right? We have some Soap Mousse!!

The soap felt brittle and flaky, but its still soap! It is just a huge chunk of soap now! And definitely a conversation piece as it now sits in the guest bathroom! 

Researching why the soap turned into foam, we learnt this: Soap softens when heated. The air and water trapped in the soap is also heated which causes the water to vaporize and the air to expand. The expanding gases pushes on to the softened soap causing it to expand as well and become foam-like. Popping popcorn works pretty much in the same way. We have some cool plans for this Soap Mousse. Stay tuned!! More experiments coming later in the week!

Have you been wondering like myself...

Every now and then for the past month or so, I have been getting emails with blog posts and recaps from Nara-saz and I have absolutely NOTHING to do with it. I have not been here to make any changes to the settings nor have I have given admin access to anyone else. So it boils down to this one thing, Nara-Saz is missing me and calling me and hinting at me to pay attention and give it some TLC. So I am calling out to all my readers to please go ahead and open up a notepad and start to write/draw something interesting... Submit it to me and your post will be on Nara-Saz... How does that sound??

In the meanwhile, I wanted to wish everyone a Happy Eid Mubarak. Hope everyone had as much fun as we did. The kids decided to celebrate Eid in a grand way this time since Eid was during the summer break and they had the time to prepare and not worry about school.

Have you heard that a picture is worth a thousand words? I will conclude with these picture.. Great job RUNRSZ!!!

Cake decorating!

Ru, U and N decided to take a cake decorating class from *yours truly*  and I must say, I am very VERY impressed how their cakes turned out!!

I should have taken pictures throughout the process but because I was so caught up with everything else.. it slipped off my mind.. it would have been fun though..but S was there with the right intentions..

Anyways..

Before I can can show you the pics, I must tell you that Ru and U baked their cakes all by themselves while N helped me. If by this time you are wondering what R and S and Z were upto, Z was keeping herself entertained between eating rice krispies, watching signing time, doing what-not on my phone and watching us from time to time. S, although wanted a cake of her own, decided on being the photographer and my helper. That's a whole different story that the pics that I reviewed later showed everthing but the cake decorating process :)

Now coming to R, well.. this whole cake decorating class idea evolved when me and R were already in the process of decorating a cake in a round gift box theme. So we continued that while the girls started off on their cakes from bottom up.

Here are the fisnished cakes 4 hours and 4 tylenols later - Joking on the Tylenol, although anticipating to take them, pleased to say that I didnt need any as it was so much fun! Lets do it again sometime!

Ru's masterpiece

U's artistry

N's showpiece

And R's assisted giftbox cake

All these guys were filled with strawberry filling, by the way.. Yumm.. Want to take a peek inside? Don't blame me if you see yourself licking your screen..

Thanks kiddos!! It was so much fun!!