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We finally finished up both Emily and Anne’s science fair projects tonight. Anne did all her researcch and experimentation a few weeks ago and made her display a couple of days ago so she wasn’t rushed at the end. I forced Emily to change projects relatively late in the game so she needed every last day to finish her report and display. That being said, she has been working on the research for the last couple of weeks now so putting the final report and display together tonight wasn’t too big of a project.

Anne’s project was the same old paper towel project that we’ve done for the past two years. After the third year in a row of that project I put my foot down and said that nobody can do paper towels again. No surprising results in this project. While it probably won’t win an award it is certainly worth a good grade.

Anne’s Display

Emily’s project was “Effects of Soft Water on a Seed”. I was actually interested in doing this project with Emily to determine if watering seeds with soft water would hurt them. Emily’s project produced surprising results in that the seeds watered with soft water sprouted faster and grew faster than the hard water seeds. We were expecting soft water seeds to do worse because soft water is reputedly bad for plants due to the high salt content.

Emily’s Display

One thing that might have produced unexpected results was that the water temperature of soft water is warmer than that of hard water. This is due to the fact that soft water goes through the indoor water softener first while hard water comes in directly from outside. I think I’ll try the experiment again when I start my garden seedlings in a month or two and see if better controlling the water temperature produces a different outcome.

Overall I thought the girls both did a good job on their projects and I’m glad that we’re done for this year. Next year Emily will be in Middle School where science fair isn’t a requirement and Texas will be in 3rd grade where it is also not a requirement. Thus, we’ll only have Anne’s project next year…

…Horselers.

Anne’s birthday finally came today. As Grandpa Kent metioned in an email, Anne hasn’t stopped talking about her birthday for the past few months. A couple of Anne’s friends from our old neighborhood came down and they all went swimming in the neighborhood pool for the party. Anne got a brand new swimsuit for the occasion

Anne getting ready to open her presents and modeling her new suimsuit

She requested a yellow cake with German Chocolate frosting. I could tell Nancy wasn’t really excited about that cake request but it sounded just dandy to me. Nancy harumphed a bit but ended up making the cake. The birthday celebration wasn’t as much fun without Sam and Caroline who are on vacation with Grandma and Grandpa. The house just seems kind of empty without them.

Our birthday celebration sans Sam and Caroline

Anne got new art supplies (she gets these every Christmas and birthday), a video game, the aforementioned swimsuit, and a Target gift card so she can go shopping and pick out whatever she wants. She seemed to enjoy the day and I hope it lived up to her expectations.

Getting ready to blow the candles, Emily looks like she is preparing to help from across the table

Emily and Anne had their piano recital this evening. One thing I like about this teacher is that she makes the kids memorize the pieces and she makes them bow. Both Emily and Anne did a pretty good job (a few mistakes here and there). I think they’re progressing fairly well. Now if I can only get Caroline to make progress.

Anne playing “Jericho”

NOTE: This is the first time I’ve uploaded video to the internet so we’ll see how it goes. I’m using YouTube for now so that their bandwidth is consumed and not my own; however, Nancy is fussing over the fact that the video is on YouTube – she has some fear that people will use it for nefarious purposes. We’ll see how it goes…

NOTE 2: The knocking sound is an artifact of when I transferred the video from the camera to the computer. I’ll have to mess with my video transfer settings and figure out why that is occuring.

Emily playing a sonatina

In past recitals, Grandma or Grandpa has been there and have taken the kids out for a treat afterwards. I didn’t really want to go out for a treat this time but I was the only one (I could tell Nancy was campaigning to not have to go home and make dinner) so I got outvoted. Nancy chose the place: Iceberg Drive Inn. (Yes, it’s really spelled that way). Not my favorite place but Nancy sure likes it.

I think her favorite thing about Iceberg is the the shakes. The big shake in the picture is called a “mini-shake”. I would hate to see what the large size looks like…

This week I was out of town at the Laguna Cliffs Resort for a Kofax reseller’s conference (Dataimage is a vendor of Kofax software and services. Incidentally, Dataimage just won Top Reseller in the Rocky Mountain region for 2005) when Nancy called me and told me that she thought Anne had broken her arm riding on the neighbor’s scooter. It’s rather irritating because last year Emily broke her arm riding on the exact same scooter.

I think the problem with the scooter is that Emily and Anne get on it and try to go as fast as their friends do when they don’t have the experience on it. Anyway, Nancy took Anne to the doctor where Anne got a splint on her arm and an appointment to come back in a few days and get a cast. During the next few days Anne complained that her other arm hurt as well so when Nancy took her to get a cast, the doctors also X-rayed the other arm.

Anne at the doctor’s office (that’s Baby Diana in the stroller)

Yup – you guessed it. It turns out that both arms were broken. This makes a total of five broken arms that our three oldest girls have suffered – three of the broken arms coming on scooters. I don’t want to outlaw the (I thought it was way lame when I was a kid and some kid’s parents wouldn’t let them jump on trampolines) but I do wish my girls would use a little common sense and not try to go as fast as their friends when they don’t have enough practice on the scooter yet.

I also wasn’t happy that Anne let other people scribble on her cast but at least she chose a good color.