Egg-cellent experiments

Sorry for the eggy pun, I couldn’t resist. So if you couldn’t guess, today’s post is about the egg experiments I did with Kara in April. I’m not really sure how I stumbled on to the experiment, but I think it was via craftgawker. It is where I find lots of craft inspiration and sometimes there is fun stuff like this.

The first experiment, which can be found here, was to dissolve the egg with vinegar.

After we left it for 48 hours, it looked like this:

Kara thought it was weird feeling and rubbery.

We compared the egg to a normal egg, it was a little bigger (left). The egg was slightly translucent so we could see the yolk inside. Kara thought it was pretty cool.

Next, we took the egg and put it in a glass of corn syrup, as described here. I only had the dark stuff but the result was the same.

Here’s our egg at the start and here’s what it looked like after:

It shrunk to be just a little bit bigger than the yolk and shrivelled.

The next step was to reverse the process. Here’s the instructions. Kara and I decided to dye the water purple.

Our egg turned a gorgeous, rich purple. It was so pretty we were kind of sad to see it go.

Bye, bye awesome egg.

Hello Kitty and… Dinosaurs??? a.k.a. Planning my daughter’s birthday party

It’s hard to believe my little girl is turning four in a couple of months. Where does the time go? It’s crazy to think she’s going to be four.

So, I’ve started planning out her party. It’ll probably be a small, at-home party, with a few kids and family. I’d love to be able to go out and do something fun at one of the many places you can do kids parties. But we really don’t have the money to do it. Which is fine. There are plenty of birthdays ahead I wish the weather would cooperate for her birthday, because then we could go outside. Our place is a little small to be having large groups of people. But every single year since she was born there has been snow, either still on the ground from a snowfall earlier in the week, therefore making it icy in spots, or sometime during the party there’s flurries. Either way, it’s not really warm enough out for the kids. That’s the only thing consistent about the end of April in Alberta. Which is pretty sucky. And with the way this winter has been, it’s hard to say what the spring is going to be like. So our party’s are a little cozy and everyone seems to have fun regardless.

Planning her party is a little easier with Kara knowing what she wants for cake and decor. Mom gave us the dinosaur cake pan that was bought for my ninth (I think?) birthday and Kara has been in love with it ever since. She reminds me every couple of weeks how she wants the dinosaur cake for her birthday. It’s adorable, and yet, highly annoying. But mostly adorable. Then, the other day we were at the toy store and I decided to check out the party supplies to see what she wanted, or give her an idea and she loved the Hello Kitty stuff. Dinosaur cake and Hello Kitty tableware. Yep. She has such varied tastes and I love it. It makes it far more fun.

So, today I’ve been trying to figure out how to decorate for her party. I’ve been browsing Pinterest (you can find me here) and craftgawker for some inspiration. Some really great ideas, I just need to figure out how to incorporate the theme. I’m hoping I can convince Kara not to have everything pink, even though I know it’s her fave colour. With having our wedding colours pink and brown last year, I’m all pinked out. I’m going to try go for rainbow colours, instead of just pink. If she really wants pink though, I won’t fight with her over it because it is her birthday after all.

Anyways, I’ve had a few ideas pop up in my head while looking today. One was buying some plastic dinos from the dollar store and painting each one a colour of the rainbow. Or, if she happens to not like the rainbow idea, I’ll do silver instead. Dress them up a little. Another was finding some Hello Kitty and dinosaur colouring pages on the internet, printing them off and buying some little boxes of crayons from the dollar store for all the kids. Then, I’ll dress up the plain boxes with some pretty scrapbooking paper. Each child will get a box to take home and they can have some fun colouring together.

I made a board on Pinterest of inspiration for her party, and I’m sure it’s going to grow, a lot. http://pinterest.com/sparklinghallow/kara-s-birthday-party-inspiration/