Halloween

I was not going to dress up for Halloween this year, but then there was a costume contest in my organic chemistry glass, and the winner got an extra point on the next exam, so I figured it might be worth it to throw something together.

To the average Joe I'm a bear.  To a chemist, I'm something slightly more specific.

When a molecule has polarity (slightly electric positive or negative regions), you write it with a lowercase delta and the polar charge.

Notice anything?  I'm a polar bear!  I still don't know if I won the contest.  Votes hadn't been tallied by the end of class.

Liam got to be Loki again, this time with the up-coming Thor Ragnarok movie as the inspiration.  We kind of meshed up a combination of the costumes he wears in the movie to get our version. I bet you can't even tell which one below is Loki or Liam

(PS, neither Loki nor Liam are levitating knives, they're flipping them.  Cool.)

Reese is really into cats lately, and wanted to be a black cat.  She and two of her friends all dressed up as cats together.  It must be popular this season, because Reese tells me she counted a total of 19 cats at school today!

I think she's one cute cat!  She even did her own makeup.

And here's a black cat gif to make things even.  Also this may or may not describe the way Reese behaves when she's pretending to be a cat.

First Day of School

Today was the first day of school for the kids.  Reese is starting 4th grade and Liam is in 2nd!

We rode walked/biked/scootered to school with friends

Liam had a hard time and was very nervous.  He got a little teary when he couldn't find his class' line to get into the school.  I reminded him that I was there and even if he missed the line, I could take him inside.

The first day of school also happened to be the day of the "Great American Solar Eclipse".  It is an eclipse that will have totality viewable from one American coast to the other.  Where we are at was a 90% eclipse.  It was awesome, but I still feel bad that we didn't make the drive up to Idaho to see totality.

Eclipse glasses- check!  These sold out everywhere earlier last week.

Making crescent eclipse shadows!

South Carolina

Our first activity of summer break was to fly to South Carolina and spend the week in a house by the beach with family

We visited a lighthouse

We got photos on the beach

We played with cousins

And make shapes in the sand

We stopped at an East coast frozen custard joint

We went to live music in the park, where we also got balloon animals (or swords) and face paint.

We played with Gramma and Grampa

And did a lot of driving...

And flying

And had a blast!

Stuff

Reese and Liam both entered their first science fair this school year.

Liam wanted to do an experiment on rocks and crystals, so we did some research and visited different locations to get different kinds of rocks. Then we cracked them open to see what was inside.

Reese did an experiment to find out why there was always a puddle of water around her cup when she left it out on the table.  Her research indicated that water in the air can turn to liquid water if the temperature changes, so we set up an experiment to see if we could get the water to condense around her cup.

She did awesome!

Summer time E Z Bake oven brownies

We're into making our own mixes so we don't have to buy them.

And they turned out great!

Liam is taking break dancing

And seems to really like it!

I like that they are teaching him the history as well as the moves.

Family Pictures

Thanks to my sister Nikenzie, we got some family pictures taken!

Last year I wanted to get some family pictures, but I didn't think we needed anything too fancy, so I figured we would just coordinate our Christmas outfits (the kids get a fancy outfit to wear to church around Christmas each year) and get a family member to take a photo.  I chose the colors red and gold because I figured they were Christmas-y, but not overtly Christmas-y so that we could hang the photo on the wall all year round.

Part of the outfits were matching ties for Liam and Will with red and gold stripes.  I didn't think about it, but when they wore the ties to church everyone else noticed that the ties were obviously Gryffindor ties.  Will was continually asked if he was Harry Potter.  I was surprised, but immediately owned that title.  Yep.  Totally meant to get matching Harry Potter ties. And that's why we now ready Harry Potter as a family, so Liam knows what people are talking about.

Even though it wasn't really planned, this year we had to continue the theme- so our coordinating colors are green and silver- Slytherin!