Making edible model bones.

Last night K & M requested that A & I have a lie-in this morning, because the two of them wanted to do secret things on their own first thing.  I'm never going to argue against that sort of suggestion, so A and I had a time for a nice chat, while K & M were doing 'secret things' which included practising Christmas songs on the piano, but other than that I am still in the dark.

Once we did get up, K & I had a look at the body that we'd been lent along with the felt skeleton.  There are various bones (or collections of bones), a brain, muscles of the arm and leg, trachea & oesophagus, heart, lungs, diaphram, liver, stomach, intestines, kidneys and bladder.

I think that's it! We'd come across most of these before in our chats, except the diaphram.  So K & I did some breathing using inter-costal muscles and then using our diaphrams instead, M was busy on the computer at this time, but she and I did the same later.  K did a pretty good job of putting everything back where it came from.

Fitting the rib cage on after everything else had fitted in!

We also looked at our body encyclopedia again and this time, looked at the stomach a bit.  This covered a different sort of muscle, sphincters, so we talked about the obvious one, the anus, and then the pyloric sphincter.  We have a particular interest in this particular muscle as K had a pyloric stenosis as a baby and needed an operation at just five and a half weeks old.  We also discovered that the diaphram is involved with vomiting as well as breathing, as the diaphram and the abdominal muscles contract forcing the stomach contents back up when the stomach lining is irritated by something bad we've eaten.  We found that accidents can occasionally be very useful in making medical progress, as the encyclopedia told us about a man who accidentally shot himself in the side, causing a fistula (permanent hole) in his stomach, which allowed a doctor called William Beaumont to conduct experiments into digestion. 

Last night we talked about the composition of bones: tough outer membrane, compact bone, spongy bone with the red bone marrow in its spaces, yellow bone marrow and blood vessels.  Today, inspired by this blog we made edible bones!  Here is the result.

 

 

You can see the blue arrows pointing, from the top, to:

the tough outer membrane - a wrap

yellow bone marrow - plum jam

blood vessels - strawberry laces

spongy bone with red bone marrow in its spaces - brioche

compact bone - shortbread fingers

In a couple of weeks time, we will hopefully have a good sized bone (or part of one at least) to have a good look at, as A asked one of the stall holders at the Farmers' Market if they might have one we could have, and, since they usually just bin them, they were happy to oblige.