Happy Easter!

This morning, when finishing off the Easter egg treats, I found that the tricky bits weren't entirely over.  I discovered that, because of the amount of glue involved, the balloons are stuck quite securely to the thread, so the trick is to release the thread from the balloon before popping the balloon, as otherwise the thread gets pulled inwards with the popped balloon.  Even so, I think the results are pretty effective!  If we were to do this again, I don't think I would use home-made chocolates, as I think we would be able to find some smaller foil wrapped eggs, which would fit more easily into the water balloons.

In other news, we have watched Harry Potter and The Deathly Hallows Part 1, and are planning on watching Part 2 tomorrow.  M went outside with A and separated the numerous sunflower seedlings from Asfordby into new pots, this wasn't necessary for K, as she had only planted a couple of seeds and only one those germinated, rather than the 9 or so of M's.

This evening M had a play with the Bananagrams tiles and I was impressed and quite surprised at some of the words she had made, including toilets, teenager, beetroot and more, there were only a couple of words where I wasn't entirely sure what she was trying to spell - jas (I thought she meant jars, but more logically, given that it was linked with has, she had meant jazz) and the exceeding unphonetic nephew, for which she'd made the creditable attempt of nefue.  While she was doing this, K counted the coppers in our whisky bottle (a 4.5 litre one from days doing bar work during uni holidays).

There's £15.83 in there apparently!

Easter eggs and other stuff.

Quite a while ago now, I spotted a link on Facebook (thank you to whoever it was who put it there, apologies that I can't remember who you are to give you credit!), that I thought might be a nice idea to try.  It was called Easter Egg Treats and looked pretty straightforward, but very effective.  So having made some chocolate egg halves and wrapped them up, I had a go myself to see how it turned out.  I discovered that when they say water balloons, they really do mean that, as the result wasn't brilliant!  So having ordered some water balloons from ebay, we waited and they arrived today.  I had already made some chocolate egg halves, as I said, but since I was making some rum truffle filled chocolates for A for Easter (he's been away for a couple of days and got back this evening), I used the left over tempered chocolate to make some more and wrapped them.



The chocolate egg halves

Then I found that the first stage of this particular craft activity is by far the hardest:  getting the chocolates inside the balloons.  Eventually, with the help of M and a pair of thin chopsticks, we ended up with 9 chicken egg sized balloons, each with a couple of egg halves inside.  The other 11 balloons in the pack all perished in the attempts!


Some of the successful attempts.

M decided that she's done her contribution towards this particular activity and went elsewhere to do her own crafty thing, making Easter presents for various people, the results of which I am sure we will be seeing tomorrow!  So K and I continued...

We mixed 'gloopy glue' with water.

Dipped embroidery thread in it and wound it round the balloons.

Using two or three different colours.

Then, having put the clean, dry socks away, we hung them to dry. 

And hopefully by tomorrow they will be dry enough
 for us to pop the balloons and reveal the final result!

K & M have also been working on a big project, that I have only recently been allowed to know about.  It has involved pooling resources to make a purchase and making various things.  I'm not allowed to say any more yet, but will be allowed to once it all comes together.

I have also finished reading The Tales of Beadle the Bard, which we have all enjoyed.  K has said that she really liked Dumbledore's notes on the tales more than the tales themselves and I must admit that I have found them brilliant.  I must share an extract which had me laughing out loud and having to explain myself to the girls.  It is in the notes for 'Babbity Rabbitty and her Cackling Stump' on the particular point that not even magic can truly bring the dead back to life:

As the eminent wizarding philosopher Bertrand de Pensées-Profondes writes in his celebrated work A Study into the Possibility of Reversing the Actual and Metaphysical Effects of Natural Death, with Particular Regard to the Reintegration of Essence and Matter: 'Give it up.  It's never going to happen.'
(for the non-French speakers - Bertrand de Pensées-Profondes translates as Bertrand of Deep-Thoughts).

 

And we're done....sort of.

Over the last couple of days, I have read the last dozen or so chapters of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.  Again I struggled at times to read, not so much when much loved characters died, but when their friends and family were grieving over them.  K & M were clearly sad, but not distressed at these times.  Also it was quite tricky at one point today, as I had a slight nose bleed at a point when stopping wasn't really an option, so I continued reading whilst pinching my nose for a while!

I say "we're done...sort of" for a couple of reasons.  Firstly because we've got The Tales of Beadle the Bard and the final two films still to go and secondly because when I went upstairs to say goodnight this evening, K & M were tucked up in bed together reading.  M has started The Philosopher's Stone and K is reading The Chamber of Secrets.  K would still really like me to start reading the whole series all over again, but I need a bit of a break even if she doesn't.

I think the conversation we had on the way home from swimming yesterday was probably a Harry Potter prompted one - what happens when we die?  My answer was that different people believe different things about what happens when you die, including heaven and hell, reincarnation, nothing.  When they asked me what I believe, I told them that I really didn't know, but that I thought heaven was a lovely idea.  Both girls liked the idea of being with dead loved ones again, but decided that maybe whatever you believe is what happens to you.  So those who believe in reincarnation are reincarnated and so on.  I asked what would happen if you didn't know what to believe and they decided that for those people when you die, you go and have a tea party with God and, if I've understood right, decide after you've had a chat!

A sad day (in Harry Potter)

We started the day (before breakfast in K and my case) with Harry Potter in bed, including the sad death of K's favourite character, Dobby.  The day was interspersed with more chapters while K & M kept their hands busy with various activities such as making crafty things or playing with trains.

K finished the crafty thing she's been working on for the past couple of days this morning (while I was reading more Harry Potter of course!).  It was based on this idea from 50 Fairy Things to Make & Do:

However, K gave it a pirate twist, because, as she said pirates 'are much more me' than fairies.  She was particularly pleased with the pirate's freckles.

M made and coloured in some paper dolls (they were all joined up, but she decided to separate them).  To give an idea of size, they're on top of a standard sized envelope, so really quite diddy!

M got the Monopoly out for the first time in ages and we had a game which ended in M & K ganging up on me (M overpaid K hugely near the end, so she'd have more money) because I was winning!  K's mental arithmetic, in working out change seems to have improved quite a bit since we last played.

More Harry Potter - Human Body connections

In addition to the usual multiple chapters of Harry Potter, we explored the Human Body some more today and found more connections between that and what we'd been reading.

A while back we took the girls' pulses before and after running up and down the stairs and talked about heart rates.  Today we finally got around to taking this one step further and took their pulse a couple more times afterwards, having run up and down two flights of stairs three times.  We discovered that their heart rates return to their pre-exercise rate an awful lot quicker than mine, when I did the same.  The plan is to make a graph of the results tomorrow.

Having done this I read some of the section about the heart from our Human Body - a children's encyclopedia, while they were having their tea and it was then that the girls and I both learned something new, that linked Harry Potter and the human body.  For the girls it was that the word 'atrium' has an architectural meaning (there's one in the Ministry of Magic) and an anatomical one.  For me, it's that 'heart strings' (some wands have a dragon heart string core) aren't just a figure of speech, but we do actually have heart strings.

In other news, M has been box modelling today, making a house out of the box our new toaster came in, I'm not sure if it's finished yet, but I do know that it does have a loo.  K has been working on a crafty project that she's doing that she found in an Usborne book.

Finally, an interesting conversation we had in the car on the way to korfball.  We give a lift to a schooly friend, A, who is the same age as K and the conversation came around to ages within school years.  A commented that it was a bit strange that the oldest and youngest girls in her class are best friends because of the nearly 12 month age gap.  M immediately commented that she's good friends with a 16 year old, also called M and we talked about how with HE groups there's much more mixing between ages and that school is a rather artificial environment in this way.  M also pointed out that she, M, is friends with A's mum too.  I find it really interesting that HE children, not only have a much wider range of friends in terms of ages, but also consider adults friends too, in a way that schooled children rarely do.

Funny where things take you.

M wasn't happy again with me today.  This time it was because I wouldn't take her to the park on the way home from the shops.  It was, however, brass monkeys out there and neither K nor I was keen on the idea, to put it mildly.

We did, however, read quite a lot more Harry Potter and we're nearly half way through the last book now.  I'm starting to think about what we might read together next, although K has already said she wants me to start again with book one as soon as we finish!  I've said if she wants them again, she can read them to herself.

In a round-about way we did a bit more on our ongoing topic of the human body.  We managed to get onto the topic of baldness, via Kingsley Shacklebolt (a Harry Potter character, who is bald) and from there to alopecia.  K then asked the question: Do people with alopecia lose the hair from inside their nose?  So we looked on the computer and found out that in some cases, yes they do.  In fact it is only in these cases that alopecia has a direct impact (other than the stress it would undoubtedly cause) on health, since the hairs in the nose and ears and eyelashes are part of our bodies' defences system.

In other news, K & M have gone into production of pigmy puffs, which are of course miniature puffskeins, small fluffy animals that Fred & George sell in Weasley's Wizard Wheezes.

Getting it all wrong.

That's me - getting it wrong by the way, at least as far as M is concerned.  This afternoon, as A is rather stressed and overworked getting ready for his 24 hour trip to Rome (he's leaving in the middle of the night tonight and getting back in the middle of the night tomorrow!), and there was a crafty activity on at our newly re-opened library (yes, on a Sunday!), K, M and I went along to check it out. 
There were good bits and bad bits about the trip this afternoon, although by the time we got home if you'd asked M she would certainly have concentrated on the bad bits.

Good things

Bad things

We met up with friends there

I hadn't checked the time, so we were
rather rushed doing the craft

They made some lovely 3D butterflies

The girls claim they asked me to look
after their butterflies, I was unaware of
this, so we came home without them.

We went to the park with the friends we
met up with (K & A) and the girls had
fun building snowmen.

Then, while my K carried on with her
creation, M, K & A had a snowball fight.

I accidentally hit M in the eye
with a snowball.

 

Unfortunately it always seems to be the bad bits that stick in the mind.  Ho hum!

M & A finishing off their snow creation.

A posing with the finished article.

K's Snow Dobby!

A couple of episodes of Walking With Beasts and a drink of hot chocolate later and all was well once more, so we had a couple more chapters of Harry Potter.  Then for tea, K wanted 'something more than just sandwich-y stuff', so with a bit of help made a cheese and ham omelette for herself and M.  The day was finished off with some More William with daddy before he gets a very early night to get up to head off to Rome and stupid o'clock.  So all in all, I don't think we got it all wrong after all.