Skating Programme

Mollie is working on her first programme with Alice.
Step sequences, spirals and jumps.

Still needs a bit of polishing, and extending to 1 minute 30 seconds, but it's a good start.

Shed Science

As soon as I say we haven't done anything to blog about I remember we have. Well, I say we, Mollie and Daddy have cleaned out the garage.

This was prompted because she bought the book, 101 Incredible Experiment for the Shed Scientist (I tried to put a link to Amazon but failed) and wants to set up a lab. as described in it. Our shed is a little small, a little full of garden tools and a little falling down so, spured on by the author's comments that a shed is a state of mind rather than a place, we are going to use the garage.

It was a good excuse to get rid of all the rubbish that had built up in there, packing boxes, outgown bikes and bits of tents we no longer have. Now she just has to find everything on the list to stock her laboratory and start experimenting.

I wonder if the garage is listed along with the house ?
Watch this space for the re-build photos :0)

Quiet Week

Well it has got to Friday and I realised that we haven't done anything to blog about this week. But that doesn't mean we haven't done anything.

We have had all the normal classes, skating, riding and piano, and the girls have continued working on their Conquer Maths. Hannah has been preparing some work for the Open University, she is applying for a place on one of their 10 point courses and has a poem to analysis and a letter to write. Mollie has decided to work on improving her handwriting.They have both been thinking about subjects for next months exposition and they have also been shopping for Daddy's birthday, met up with friends in Edinburgh and helped get the house ready for Easter guests.

So, while we have had no major photo oppertunities we have had a busy week. It's nice to list everything we have been doing because sometimes it can feel a bit like we aren't doing much when actually we are just quietly busy.

Cream Cheese

Given the reference to yoghurt in the title of this blog I thought we should infact include some. However don't get your hopes too high up, its not woven, but made into cheese...

We lined a sieve with a piece of thin cloth (an Ikea napkin I think) and poured the yoghurt in, rested the sieve over a pan and put the whole lot on the handy little shelf under the stairs (a very cold place in our house. By the next morning the whey had run off into the pan below and we were left with cheese in the cloth.

The cheese was a bit tart for our liking, but I think this was mainly due to the yoghurt we used - the next plan is to find some milder yoghurt and have another go. Maybe we will make the yoghurt ourselves first and then we can determine the acidity of it.

Girl Guide returns

Mollie has returned from Guide camp, with a rucksack bigger than her and a 'Guide Holiday' badge. She had a fantastic time doing crafts, making rafts and, judging from how tired she is, not getting enough sleep. She was very impressed they had her favourite Heinz tomato soup.

According to her, the best bit was going in the burn (I think that was when their raft sank) but the worst bit was the second night because she was missing us by then.

She is nearly ready for the big district camp in May now - she just needs to find a nice, plastic bowl to take to have her lunch in :)

Big Shopping

While Mollie is on Guide Camp we took Hannah to PC world for a newe laptop as her current one is about to die and she really would be lost without one.

The model she choose was predictably at another store so she has to wait until Tuesday for it. But while we were there they decided to buy me a huge new TV for me to play my Wii on. I did have a nice TV for it but it was taken over by the PS3 at Christmas.

So in the absence of the new laptop Hannah decided to polish up her baseball skills on the Wii - and managed 3 home runs, a family record :)

Exposition

Today was our first attempt at Exposition in Scotland, after having done it for a year in Spain.

Once we had got past the disaster of the hall knowing nothing about our booking we all decided to go to the park instead as it was a nice day. Julia did a facsinating talk on the probable evolution of Yoshi - it was really clever how she had applied the principle of evolution to a fictional chracter. Mollie then told us about beavers and showed her cross section model of a beaver dam. After that Hannah showed us slides on the laptop (luckily the battery was full)about Tudor fashions, followed by a talk about Hand Ba' in Jedburgh by Robert. His little brother Alexander then delighted us all by telling us how he had made a walking stick, and Eleanor finished the session off by telling us about scounting and the camps she had been on.

The audience all seemed to enjoy the talks, and we will definatly be doing it again next month ... we just have to think of new topics