05May
2

Where have we been hiding out?

Making a hideout fort

It’s been a week since I posted – I’m a terrible Blog Mommy, huh? 🙂

Since then, we’ve been hiding out all over the place – and more details on our adventures, which included Vincent Van Gogh, Rocky, an antique store, a live bear, a walking robot and more, will be forthcoming – but in the meantime, I thought I’d show you where some of us have literally been hiding out.

Welcome to Ashar’s hideout.

It all starts when I decided that, since I’m working from home almost all the time now, I might really want to consider a new office chair. Off we went to the Office Max sale a few weeks ago, and home came a new chair, a thing of wonder, beauty and fewer trips to the chiropractor.

It came in a large box, with some assembly required. Ashar scoped out the box, decided the wanted to keep it for “a project,” and carted it to her basement workshop.

Last weekend, it returned upstairs. Ashar showed us that she could get INSIDE the box (which was almost frightening, to be honest), and then she said she wanted to turn it into a hideout.

Well, leave it to Mom – I decided it might be a bit more comfortable if we raised the roof. So we used a box-cutter (I helped with this part) and slit along both edges of the larger, flat side. Effectively, that left us with a base and two short sides, plus a tall “back” with a flap that hangs down a bit in the front.

We braced the back with Ashar’s yardstick (the blue stick up the center) and used painter’s tape to help affix the box to the wall. You can’t see it too well, but it’s wedged between my piano and the wall in the dining room, and after decorating it with stickers, a bow, and a mailbox that we were all instructed we needed to deliver messages to, a hideout was born.

It wasn’t long before Ashar realized that a blanket would pad it out a bit. She pulled our green afghan in and sat and played with her stuffed animals and her 3DS.

Sleeping in a hideout fort

Well, you know what that turned into. “Mom, I can sleep here! I can sleep in my hideout!” That was big for Ashar, who really doesn’t like to sleep anywhere different, and the first night, she got all settled, then decided she’d rather go up to bed after all.

But the following two nights, she got over the initial weirdness and decided she LIKED her new abode.

Sleeping in a hideout fort

Yep, my kid sleeps in a box in the corner of the dining room. What of it? 🙂

27Apr
5

Making homemade ice pops and studying freezing

Something entirely prompted by Ashar this week was a study of freezing and boiling… and she decided to start by asking, “Can we make our own ice popsicles?” We ended up making not only a true “ice popsicle” out of water, but also an orange juice pop, two lemonade pops and an iced tea pop.

Ingredients for homemade ice pops

Here are our ingredients – including popsicle sticks, press-and-seal to hold the sticks in place, and our drinks, as well as some Crummy Disposable Plastic Cups (all I had to contribute to her spur-of-the-moment idea; they made some weird-shaped pops, but they’re easy to crack to get off the popsicle!)

Ice pops before being frozen

Ashar poured the liquid into the cups (leaving room for the ice to expand); I helped her cover the tops with press-and-seal, and we cut small slits in the covers to slide the popsicle sticks through.

Homemade ice pops in the freezer

Into the freezer they went… and we promptly kind of forgot about them for a day or so!

In the meantime, Ashar decided to “play” with boiling water and a pan full of ice. She figured out that ice floats (and I explained why); learned why the ice cracks when you pour hot water onto it; and guessed and then experimented to see which would “win” – whether the ice would make the boiling water cold first, or the boiling water would melt the ice first.

Experimenting with boiling water and ice cubes

We’re lucky to have a cool-bottomed electric teapot, which allows Ashar to do things like make tea and experiment with hot water without hurting herself on the kettle!

She did all sorts of boiling-freezing-floating-sinking experiments, and we talked about why the different things happened the way they did. We also reenacted the Titanic sinking with an old spray-paint-can lid in the pot of water (THAT was something!)

All in all, she must have spent a few hours discovering new facts about the simplest thing – water – and trying to hypothesize and test what it would do in different situations. I was thrilled… and she was almost entirely self-directed, which was also neat!

Eating a homemade ice pop

And, yes, we ate our popsicles – here’s Ashar with one of the lemonade ones. They tasted pretty good! 🙂

Linking up today to the All Year Round Blog Party: Summer Edition.