We changed to Daylight Savings Time yesterday. "Springing Forward" indeed! In my opinion, if it's that important to change the time just leave it like that, OK?!
Strangely, I never get quite so worked up about the time change in the Fall.
Anyway, after an unsuccessful attempt to wake the Zoomlians, who were busy impersonating limp and pitiful piles of sleeping goo, I went back and informed the Emperor that the Monday after the time change should be a holiday. He hastily agreed (for some reason we were running late this morning). I told him it should be Zombie Day.
Inspiration! I went back and told the Zoomlians that if they could get up and ready in 15 minutes, they could each play Plants vs. Zombies* for 15 minutes this afternoon. It will be difficult to remove the skid marks from their beds, but very worth it.
* This game has no educational or socially redeeming value, it's just very, very, very funny.
Ah, yes, that special time that comes but once a year.. The Monday after we spring back into Daylight Savings Time and stumble about searching for caffeine joyfully greet the day with the cheery thought that it will be too light this evening to convince our children to go to bed at a reasonable time.
I am convinced that those who actually like DST have never had childrendo not have to get up in the morninghave a sadistic streak have a weak circadian rhythm. There are some people who can nap during the day, eat meals at wildly varying times, and sleep and rise in an irregular pattern.
I can do none of these since I personally have the Chuck Norris of circadian rhythms, and attempting to diverge from my regular pattern of eating or sleeping causes it to slap me stupid while telling me to "stop hitting myself." For people like me, DST hurts. And it's stupid! And I like to whine about it in italics and bold, and bold italics!
And it always happens during Lent!
Let's watch this short educational video vindicating my opinion, then we can move on to Zombie Day Fun!
The Gospel for the third Sunday had Jesus cleansing the Temple by making a whip of cords (and flipping tables and what not).
I went with the theme of "whipped," and we had a whipped pistachio mousse topped with whipped cream.
I totally cheated on the mousse. It's instant pistachio pudding (a long time guilty pleasure), sifted to remove the nut fragments and folded into whipped cream to lighten it up.
Honestly: super easy and soooooo good!
Which brings us to last Sunday when it was an extremely complex and abstract Gospel, and Laetare Sunday, and Pi Day, AND Daylight Savings Time horrible switch.
And it's the only day for dessert, so...
We had pink lemonade (pi)es with chocolate chip snakes on them because Jesus mentioned "Just as Moses lifted up the bronze serpent in the dessert desert, so will the Son of Man be lifted up."
He also talked about being the light of the world, and the pies were super light and fluffy.
Did I mention the time change may have made me a little loopy?
Anyway, it's another easy dessert: 1 can of pink lemonade concentrate, two tubs of whipped topping, 1 can of sweetened condensed milk, and one (softened) brick of cream cheese.
The original recipe had no cream cheese and 2 cans of condensed milk, but I knew from experience that that would be too sweet for us, and the cream cheese also stabilized the texture.
Ah, yes, that special time that comes but once a year.. The Monday after we spring back into Daylight Savings Time and stumble about searching for caffeine
joyfully greet the day with the cheery thought that it will be too
light this evening to convince our children to go to bed at a reasonable
time.
I am convinced that those who actually like DST have never had childrendo not have to get up in the morninghave a sadistic streak
have a weak circadian rhythm. There are some people who can nap during
the day, eat meals at wildly varying times, and sleep and rise in an
irregular pattern.
I can do none of these since I personally have the Chuck Norris of
circadian rhythms, and attempting to diverge from my regular pattern of
eating or sleeping causes it to slap me stupid while telling me to "stop
hitting myself." For people like me, DST hurts. And it's stupid! And I like to whine about it in italics and bold, and bold italics!
And it always happens during Lent!
Let's watch this short educational video vindicating my opinion, then we can move on to Zombie Day Fun!
The last time we were at the US History Museum, we saw a great clip of USO performances from WWII. Among them was this gem. I remember my Dad singing me a few lines of this on relevant occasions...
We have rolled into our third Biology unit (body systems). Last week we started with nutrition (I know, technically not a body system) and yesterday we did the digestive system.
This was great! Knowing the hows and whys of your digestive system is always news you can use!
We actually got sidetracked at first by daylight savings time and circadian rhythms (did you know the human clock is 25 hours long? This helps us continually adjust to changes in day length, and it makes adding an hour really easy, but it also makes subtracting an hour really painful!).
We talked about the changes in circadian rhythm that happen in the teenage years (there's a reason it's hard to fall asleep, and it's hard to get up!) and why that was an advantage when humans needed round the clock guarding from predators.
Oh yeah, then we talked about the digestive system!
We talked about physical digestion: breaking food into smaller pieces. We ground up some bath salt crystals in a mortar and pestle, and tried dissolving equal amounts of large crystals and ground up small crystals. We talked about the importance of maximizing surface area for chemical reactions.
We talked about chemical digestion: breaking food down into absorbable nutrients.
We did a couple of experiments here. One was to try iodine on a wide variety of foods. Based on their observations, I asked them to come up with which nutrient the iodine reacted with. They correctly said, "Complex carbohydrates!" I love these kids!!
We also did an emulsification experiment. Each kid had a jar of 1/4 cup of oil and 1/4 cup of water, and we tried 5 different possible emulsifiers: whole egg, egg yolk, egg white, mustard, and liquid soap. Emulsification is pretty critical. If oils and fats aren't broken down into smaller particles, they tend to coat the food and disallow digestion and absorption.
And, of course we talked about all the parts and pieces of the system as shown here:
We changed to Daylight Savings Time yesterday. "Springing Forward" indeed! In my opinion, if it's that important to change the time just leave it like that, OK?!
