2nd half of June 2010

The second half of June was very fun-filled. We've been spending a lot of time doing board games. Some friends of ours were playing Stratego one evening while they were here, which renewed Taipan's interest in the game. It's a Lord of the Rings Stratego game that we've had for a while, and in the past have played with the pieces, but not in the Stratego way. Last month Taipan wanted to play a modified version of Stratego, which is usually followed by some LOTR role playing.


Yuta's youngest sister Ling came to visit with Chadwick, and while she was here Taisim asked Chadwick to play a game of checkers, which led to Taipan asking about chess, and since then he's been playing quite a bit. In addition to playing on our chess board he plays on the iPhone and his computer.


My good friend Kiersten came to visit a couple of weekends ago, and she came with lots of fun stuff. Her son had been asking to do experiments, which she brought to our house. First we did dropped Mentos into Diet Coke - all of the kids enjoyed seeing the huge geyser.


Then she filled sandwich bags with water and vinegar, to which we added paper towels filled with baking soda. We were supposed to shake the bags and drop them and wait for the pop, but the reaction was so quick that we barely had time to zip the baggies up before they popped.


We also: put a string on ice, sprinkled salt on it, and then watched as the string froze into the ice for us to pick up; and crushed up iron-fortified cereal and then picked up the pieces with a magnet.

We had lots of other sweet moments, and here are a couple - the first is playing at our neighborhood pool. We didn't take advantage of this pool last year, but this year we've been a couple of times so far. The kids can both touch in the shallow end now, which is nice, and less physically demanding of me and Yuta. I sat at a table with snacks and towels at the ready with Taiko in the sling while Yuta swam with Taipan and Simi. The second picture is Taipan reading a book to Taisim - it's happened a few times over the past month or so. It's sweet to see. The last three pictures below are of things Simi has drawn. We submitted the giraffe to the one million giraffes project.