Need a quick way to impress your 5 year old?

An internet search titled 'simple science experiments' will bring forth all manner of ........er....well......simple science experiments. Funnily enough.

Just what I needed on a wet Sunday afternoon with a five year old who wanted to do 'an experience' aka an experiment. I didn't want to run to the shops to buy any special ingredients that might be needed so I trawled through a list of activities and found the perfect one. 

Perfect for my kid and for what I already had in my cupboard.

Here's what we did: 

Take one glass bottle with a wide-ish neck, we used an old juice bottle. 

Fill a water balloon or hard/soft boil an egg.

Light a scrap of paper and drop it in the bottle.

Quickly place your water balloon or egg on the mouth of the bottle.

Watch it get sucked inside the bottle.

Give a short talk on the effects of air expansion and contraction and the forces at work in this experiment.

I left bit that up to hubby.

Repeat the above steps over and over as per request, for suitably impressed 5 year old. 

Note: if you DO want to do this over and over, then use the water balloon and not the egg, for obvious reasons.

Frugal kitchen tip - stretch your dishwasher powder.

My sis, The Slightly Mad Quilt Lady put me on to this one:

Dilute your commercial dish washing powder with baking soda (soda bicarbonate).

Isn't that simple?

Sis dilutes it by half while it's in the bottle, I just put less regular stuff in the machine's dispenser and top it off with baking soda.

Green and thrifty, can't get better than that, huh?

Squiggly squirmy, luverly wormies

Living in a small house on a smaaaallllll piece of land like we do, means we have not much room for a traditional compost bin. Nor an ongoing need for one.

However, recently I have decided to make more of a concerted effort to grow some of our own vegetables and fruits. Now, unless I want to be buying bags of compost and cow poop on a regular basis (which I have done in the past), I need a way of feeding my crops.

Enter....vermiculture. Or worm farming as it is otherwise known.

Perfect for our small property and gardening needs, no smell, and helps cut down on the amount of rubbish our family sends to landfill.

Knowing that I could buy a worm farm and worms from my local council cheaper than I could at our garden centre or hardware chain, I packed up the kids last week and we traipsed off to our local council rooms.

It's now set up in a dim corner of our front yard and is already producing 'worm juice'.....actually worm pee but I know my 5 year old would have nothing to do with it if I called it that.

After a couple of days, it occurred to me in a duh moment that I could quite possibly have made my own worm farm from materials I had laying around the place. And the internet tells me that is correct, I could have.
Not sure where my brain was that day.

Oh well.

Here is a great link that explains how to make a worm farm at home:

How to make a worm farm

You'll need compost worms, red wrigglers or the like, as regular earthworms will not survive in your worm farm. These are easily available in boxes of 1000 from hardware stores and garden centres. Or maybe online if you can't find them round your area.

Give them all your kitchen scraps, except meat, dairy, citrus, onion and anything with lots of sugar. They will get through it faster if you chop it up small, although it does feel rather odd to be hand chopping all my kitchen scraps with my wormies comfort in mind.

As well as worm pee which is apparently liquid gold for your plants, after a few months you will also have a tray of castings that you can add to your garden or your plant pots.
This is my plan for feeding my baby blueberry trees, my lemon tree that looks like it might produce for the first time in just about forever, my new feijoa tree and my baby spinach plants. All the above are in pots except for the lemon tree.

I'm wondering now what else I can add to my garden menagerie......plant wise that is, as hubby won't let me torment the neighbours by turning the rest of our front yard into a chicken run. He may have a point, the unit behind ours is for sale, not sure prospective buyers would appreciate a chicken pen as our combined street frontage.

Maybe a goat.....?

Watch this space:

Rocks on the brain

I am a fan of rocks.

Big ones, little ones, smooth ones, odd shaped or coloured ones, they call to me in a way that other things in nature do not.

I'm not sure why, though I have geologists in my both my husband's family and my own extended family.

Not blood related to me though, so I can't claim familial tendency.
I stand corrected by my big sis, SHE has a geology background, so there ya go, it IS in my immediate family.

I do remember driving my parents just a wee bit crazy with the amount of rocks I used to collect and when they upped sticks and moved countries some years back, they still had a few boxes of my rocks in their house.

Needless to say, I have curbed my collection somewhat, though I do find myself encouraging my boys to pick up and closely inspect any rock that takes their fancy, I just can't seem to help myself.

And rocks are thrifty as far as entertainment goes, there are endless varieties and often there are plenty of free places to collect them from.

Another positive, if the kids....or you....get sick of the rock collection, they can be returned to nature.

So what to do with all the rocks they collect?

(Just so you know, they do not collect them from a natural source, but from a communal rock garden down the street.)

This time we painted them.

And see our recycled paint containers?
Egg cartons are perfect for this, they don't spill or tip over and they can be tossed in the recycling once you're done.

Older kids can (try) to paint shapes, faces or bugs on their rock...

And little ones can just paint........whatever.

Really, the fun at this preschool age is in the act of painting and not so much in the finished product.

And at the end, my two will invariably paint their hands.

Have you painted on your skin? It's a bit of a cool feeling and in summer, maybe I'll let them get nekkid and paint their whole selves.

But, back to the business at hand.

I love this activity on so many levels because.....

It's cheap. Er, I mean thrifty.
It involves outside time while collecting (although we have painted outside in nice weather)
It involves paint.
And rocks.
And concentration from wee people.
And mess that is usually confined to one table and two children.

All things I can deal with on an average mum-at-home-with-two-kids day.

A favour from the bloggy world, please?

I know a mum on the other side of the world to me, who's 3rd baby is due in August. 

She, Cadi, is a single mum with 2 boys and she's a second grade teacher to boot. 

Earlier this year, this mum's partner passed away, just three weeks after they found out they were expecting a baby.

I found Cadi through my sister, when she put a call out to the blogosphere for an Aussie to please send a 20c coin for her son's project on the platypus.

I happily obliged.

As a delightfully unexpected thank you, Cadi is knitting my two boys pilot hats,

and no, they won't be pink as per the above link!

You can find her blog and read her story here: MaeheGirl. 

The favour

Cadi has been nominated for the Richmondmom.com Dream Baby Shower

by her cousin. 

There are some lovely prizes to be won, massages and a photo session for a new bub among other things.

The winner is generated by votes and votes can come from anywhere in the world. 

Now, Cadi has not asked me to put this out here for all to see, but when I found out she had been nominated for the Dream Baby Shower I wanted to help out in some way.

Voting opens Saturday 5th June.

 She is listed under her legal name of Claudia Thomas. 

Scroll down the page at the above link to find the nominees, they are listed in alphabetical order under last name.

Thank you to everyone.

Could you do without your washing machine?

When my washing machine broke down last week it was full of cloth nappies/diapers and cloth wipes.

In their just-emptied-from-the-nappy-bucket-so-as-yet-unwashed-at-all state.

Yum.

As well as some family cloth that my 5 year old uses.

Well, mostly him, occasionally the rest of us use it too.

Extra yum.

The machine, a front loader, filled itself, then would not start to spin but switched itself off.

I tried to start it again, with the same result.

So, the machine is full of very soggy, unwashed cloth nappies, cloth wipes and family cloth.

Mmmm mmmm.

I pity the poor technician who has to come and fix it.

I rang the company, who agreed to fix it under warranty even though it is eight days out of warranty.

Eight freaking days!? Do they program these things to break down in that time period??

One would hope not....

So I don the rubber dishwashing gloves and haul everything out of the machine and back into the bucket.

Buckets, plural. Everything seems to have multiplied.

And start thinking of my options.

Throw the stinky, drippy buckets in the car and drive around to find a laundromat. Blerk.

Leave them in the buckets for the week-to-10-days it will take the company to order a new motor and install it. Worried that the nappies etc will start to go mouldy on this option.

Start to realise how ridiculously reliant I am on this silly but useful modern day machine.

Determine that I will deal with this myself, in house.

Google hand-washing-cloth-nappies and find that other people wash cloth nappies by hand, so I can too.

The bath. Of course!

I dumped in the buckets, gave everything that needed it a bit more of a rinse directly under the tap, then filled the bath with the hottest water the taps can produce.

I then swished them all round with a big stick and squeezed and scrubbed with my gloved hands.

And drained the water.

That's the pre-rinse cycle on my machine.

Then I filled the bath again with hot water and some detergent and added a couple of kettles full of just boiled water for good measure.

And swished, squeezed and scrubbed as per above.

That's the wash cycle on my machine.

I know you were just dying to see it, so here it all is.

(Ignore the pink, yes, I only have boys but the pink nappies were a deal I couldn't turn down...)

Filled it again with hot and let it all soak.

That's the extra rinse cycle I use for washing nappies in my machine.

Drain.

Wrung it all out by hand.

Oi, one of these old fashioned wringers would have come in handy right about then.

(As a kid, our neighbours had one and we thought it was the coolest thing ever!)

Peg it out on the drying racks and wait several days for everything to dry because we're officially in winter - not good drying weather.

Then I do one load of towels this way before I decide to send hubby to the laundromat with a couple of loads of essentials.

Conclusion:

I could possibly live without a washing machine.

I would however need to be very organised and have a better wringing out system than just my hands, as that would help with subsequent drying time.

And summer would help too.

However, the machine was fixed this afternoon, so it's a moot point.

The technician did say though, that on the brand of machine I have, the 5 year extended warranty option would have been a good investment. Oh.

(LG, in case you're wondering. And he said the same for Samsung.)

And the new motor has a 3 month warranty. Ack.

I hope there's no more handwashing cloth nappies in my immediate future....