A Birthday, and other activities

When was the last time you saw anyone play marbles? My husband and I were talking about the game, and the children over heard us, and wanted to play! So here they are! Outside on the pathways it is not level, so no good for playing, but we overcame this difficulty by bringing them inside :)

 The game only lasted as long as the tempers did, but it was fun while it lasted.

 Last week we discovered the water tank was gone!

 And my water was running straight out onto the deck!!

The tank had been knocked over the fence and was lying shattered on the ground. Sad, sad, sad. It was raining, and I couldn't use the water!
Fortunately we had three 1,000ltre water tanks around the side of the house waiting to be hooked up for use, so we just brought one of those out and Michael made a new stand and connected it instead. Funnily enough it hasn't rained since!!

I really wanted the tops of the gum trees in the back yard. I have done two so far (this one being the first one) simply by climbing the tree and sawing the top off it with my little hand saw. There is one more I mi-ight be able to do, though I will need the ladder to reach high enough to saw the narrower bit... The rest are TOO BIG, so I don't know what I'm going to do about them yet...

 It has been rather boring for the children inside while it was raining outside so I have been trying to think up different activities for them in their worst moments of boredom. Here are a couple of pictures I snapped of one activity. TP rolls, coloured like dragons with tissue paper stapled to the dragons mouth to look like smoke when the tube is blown through. FUN!

 My dear, dear husband turned 37 on the 13th. Poor man is rather self conscious about his age, so we took this opportunity to tease him a little about it, bwahahaha!

 The cake I chose for him was my Grandad's favourite, and the recipe is as follows, given to me by my mother:

Arabian Chocolate Cake

ingredience:

4oz butter

6oz sugar

1 heaped desert spoon powdered milk

2 eggs (I only had small ones so I put in three)

1/2 cup water

1 1/2 tblspoons cocoa

6oz SR flour

splash vanilla

1 desert spoon of coffee with a few drops of milk on it to make a sort of paste

method:

Cream butter and sugar together - add prebeaten eggs - then beat all together.

Add blended milk, coffee and vanilla - mix all together well.

Add flour to other ingredience, and while mixing, add water - make sure all is mixed well.

Poor into well greased, lightly floured baking tin.

Bake in preheated oven of 180 degrees for aprox 35 min.

 The teasing didn't dampen the appetites of all present at all, though, hehehe! Including the birthday boy :)

 I took it into my head to fix our wall of fame. You see, this wall (and sections of other walls) hold photo's of my babies as they have grown up, and I didn't have any up of Eli. This is no longer a problem :D

 Malachi's rat has been upgraded to the larger cage. I think it looks nice, and its less smelly. But miss rat needed to keep her tunnels. Malachi did have two rats, but he and Daddy were cleaning the cage outside (face palm!) and one escaped. They have taken an oath never to do this again!

 Another rainy weather activity we did was make crystals! The method was simple enough. The first thing you need to do is boil your water. We used about two cups of water per pint jar. While the water is boiling, you can make a shape out of your pipe cleaner. It needs to be able to fit in the jar without touching the sides or bottom.
Tie the string to the pipe cleaner, and tie the other end of the string to the pencil. The pencil sits on top of the jar and holds the pipe cleaner suspended above the bottom of the jar. Once you have your pipe cleaner shapes the correct size/length, set them aside.

Add two cups of boiling water to the jar. Then add borax, one tablespoon at a time. Stirring well each time. You will add 3 TBSPs per cup of water. So we added 6 tablespoons of borax. It's okay if some undissolved borax settles to the bottom of the jar.

If you want to add food coloring, you can add a couple drops now.

Hang the pipe cleaner shape into the jar so that the pencil rests on top of the jar and the shape is completely covered with liquid and hangs freely (not touching the bottom of the jar). Within minutes, we could see the borax beginning to collect on the pipe cleaners.

After just a few hours, we could see actual crystals forming.

Let the jars sit in an undisturbed location overnight. We set ours on the window sill. In 24 hours the pipe cleaner shapes were completely covered in beautiful borax crystals. We removed them from the liquid and allowed them to dry a few minutes

The crystals are pretty durable, and make a nice sun catcher. This is a really fun and easy project.

 Malachi's was a man.

 Phebe a red heart.

Hadassah a blue heart.
I can hardly wait to see what they do next! There has been talk of circuits...