Potato Soup

Like most children her age, Cesca loves to help in the kitchen! On occasion, her "help" is even actually helpful :)

We made potato soup and I *WISH* I had thought to take a picture of her first-ever attempt at using a potato peeler! So many of the pictures I take are because I think "oh, this is so neat" or "wow, I can't believe she just did that" or "how adorable". This is a picture I want so I could laugh really hard at it when she isn't looking! I had to work so ridiculously hard not to laugh when she proudly exclaimed that she had peeled half the potato. She had gotten frustrated and "peeled" the potato by gouging it repeatedly with the tip of the potato peeler. Half the potato had been peeled, but since at least a third of the potato was also missing, this is less useful than it sounds!

True to form, though, what I took a picture of was her doing very well at working the battery-operated pepper mill to get us a tablespoon of freshly ground pepper.

Color Mixing

Cesca has known her colors for a while, but she's still working on remembering how to mix them. What she does always remember is that when she mixes three different colors instead of just two, she somehow always gets brown. An easy experiment that we repeat with some frequency involves fizzy bath tablets in glasses of water.

We start with one primary color in each of three glasses:

From there, we choose one more primary color to add to each glass:

Until we have created all of the secondary colors:

Clifford Bubble Science

Cesca just turned 3 years old and her aunt gave her this nifty Clifford Bubble Science kit! These kits are made by The Young Scientists Club, which is best known for their Magic School Bus kits. The new Clifford sets are for the 3-5 year old crew.

In this kit there were a couple bottles of bubbles, a plastic tray, a tiny measuring cup, some straws, pipe cleaners, a rubber band, a bubble wand, a tiny funnel, and a little piece of aluminum foil. Okay, so nothing I can't normally find in my house. Most important to me was the little booklet of experiments to remind me what exactly you're supposed to do with bubbles!

Cesca loved the one where you use the aluminum foil as a boat and make it shoot across the water by touching the surface with a bit of soap! We had to dump the water for fresh and perform that one about ten times!

She also loved blowing bubbles in the water with a straw, then putting the end of the straw in a single bubble to further inflate it.

When we got to things that actually had us blowing free-floating bubbles (like with a bubble wand) the kit was a total bust. It finally occurred to me to ditch the bubble solution in the kit and use some of the Gazillion Bubbles solution that we had on hand and suddenly everything worked! Hooray for high quality bubble solution!

Blue Octopus

Cesca just turned 3 and received birthday money from her grandma. So off to the store we went for some shopping and a hidden math lesson!

She really wanted a cash register, but she had $20 and the cash register cost $40. "$40 equals two $20 bills and you only have one $20." She took it well, though she did come back to stare at that cash register a few times! We talked about being able to buy things online for less money and that same cash register cost only $24 on Amazon, but she really wanted a toy she could have in her hands that day.

We looked at puppets, play foods, magnets, jigsaw puzzles, ant farms, balls, bowling sets, paints, books... After much debate and comparison, she chose a set of Do-A-Dot markers ("paint markers") and a Do-A-Dot coloring book.

Me: are you coloring the octopus blue?
Her: no, I'm coloring the water on the octopus blue!