Away yet again!

On Tuesday it was K's birthday and we had a very busy day.  It started off with present opening, moved on to Fun Club, then home via the music shop where we picked up M's mended French horn.  Friends came for a short play before a fairly rushed meal at Pizza Express and birthday cake back at home before korfball.

The cake!

Fun Club this month was the bring and share science session.  We took along a chromotography experiment, which consisted of drawing a blob with a felt tip on a strip of blotting paper and then leaving the paper with the end dipped in a glass of water to see the what colours the ink was made up of.  The results were really quite interesting and some very pretty indeed (as were some strips that had multiple coloured blobs on them!)

The strips of paper drying out ready to be taken home.

Another experiment, which was fascinating was showing how pyrex can be made 'invisible' when submerged in oil.  Pyrex and oil have the same index of refraction, that is light travels at the same speed through the pyrex as it does through the oil and it is this fact that means the pyrex appears to disappear.  K explained this to me having had it explained to her by the boys demonstrating.  We then came home and I spotted the same experiment in the latest edition of Aquila, the theme of which is invisibility.

There really is a beaker in there!

One of the many great things about home ed, is that you can go away for a few days whenever you want to.  So, last week A took a day and a half annual leave, so that we could spend a few days with his mum, aka Nana, to tie in with the La Leche League national workshop that I was going to on the Saturday.

On Thursday we took possession of our (nearly) new hybrid electric car, something that the girls aren't particularly happy about, being really rather attached to our old car.  It's nearly a week later and we're still getting used to it, mostly because it's an automatic rather than a hybrid though I think, although it still feels very strange to plug it in when we get home!

On Friday morning we went to visit Little Grandad, for the first time in the case of the girls and me, in the care home where he is now living, due to Alzheimer's and my lovely mother-in-law now longer being able to care for him at home as she has for the last five years.  He's generally very happy there, clearly well looked after and it seems a lovely friendly place, but it's still very sad.

After our visit we went on to Chester Zoo, where Little Grandad used to work as a gardener when A was the girls' age, and was once pelted with mud by the chimpanzees when working the other side of the moat from their enclosure!  We had a lovely day there (although unfortunately I forgot the camera and the pics I took on my phone are pretty rubbish, some from a previous visit here though) and as we have done before had some interesting conversations, including with one of their 'rangers' for quite a while on one of their new islands, about conservation and the use of drones to monitor orangutans by locating for the nests they build each night to sleep in.  We also spotted, on our way to the exit shortly before closing time, what looked like a very young Philippine spotted deer that we hadn't seen when we've passed the enclosure around lunch time about four hours earlier.  It was very unsteady on it's feet and was being licked by its mum.  On asking a passing ranger, we discovered that it had indeed been born just a few hours earlier.

Since we've got back home, we've been to Old Dalby for a board games session, although the girls mostly spent time with friends.  There have also been piano lessons and korfball today.  K has started on her thank you letters, and as usual she is making cards very specific to the presents in which to write her thank yous.  I've also just realised that I haven't mentioned what I have been reading to the girls lately.  While K & M both still really enjoy being read to and nearly always ask for 'another one' at the end of a chapter, I know they are really like a book when they ask me to read to them repeatedly during the day, something that is the case at the moment.  We are currently near the end of the second of the five books in the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy trilogy and I don't think that I will be allowed to read anything else until we've finished the fifth!