Day 264, Year 8: A Little Bit of Everything
Date: Thursday, July 25, 2013
Weather: Big Change to Cool–Overcast with Sprinkles
Location: Eel Pond, Woods Hole, Massachusetts
The big news is that overnight the temperature dropped into the 60’s and it actually felt cold this morning. The past 25 days have been hot here, but the sudden change was too abrupt to feel refreshing. Cool is one thing, but feeling cold in the middle of the summer is not my idea of fun. When I look at the weather review for the day, I see the temp made it into the low 70’s, but it was windy and Sam and Jonah kept their sweat shirts on all day. So Mark and I weren’t the only ones that felt chilly.
Mark worked at West Marine today and I had Sam and Jonah for another Camp Oma day. We had no grand plans for the day, but it ended up to be jam-packed with activity. We started out in Falmouth at Goodwill Park for swim lessons. Even though the water was warm, the air was too cold to stay around after the classes ended. So we switched to an indoor activity—Legos in the Library. This is a weekly offering at the public library and it was fun, but not something I would do with the boys again. They have almost as many Legos at home as the public library has, but there were some pieces that they don’t have and they took advantage to make special vehicles incorporating the new parts. We ate lunch on the way back to Woods Hole and made a stop in the WHOI Exhibit Center on the way to Windbird to check out their weekly water activity. This week the boys got to see the pH of sea water on a color scale and it turned blue (neutral) when red cabbage juice was added. Sam and Jonah were then given straws and told to blow bubbles in the water, and almost instantly it turned purple (acidic) on the scale. Great way to show little ones how too much carbon dioxide makes changes in the environment. This stop was on our way from the car to the boat where we were going so Jonah could take a nap and Sam could work on his summer journal. When we left the Exhibit Center to continue on to Windbird, one of the Science School teachers who knows Sam and Jonah stopped us to let us see the baby skate she had in a bucket, along with skate egg cases. The little skate was no bigger than Jonah’s hand and was so cute. But where, other than Woods Hole, do you get to see this kind of thing just walking down the street? After nap Sam requested a quick trip to the aquarium, so off we went again. It was so crowded for the 4 pm seal show that we just went inside to say hello to all of the fish and head up to the touch tank for a few minutes. Then we went to meet Jed and head home for one last activity. On Tuesday, our ‘bubble’ day, I had asked Jed to see if he could get some dry ice for us. If a lab is getting a shipment, dry ice might be available, so he asked around and found some. But we didn’t have time to experiment with it on Tuesday. So today, I went home with the boys and we turned the kitchen into bubble experimentation lab. They had learned from the ‘bubble man’ about soap films and learned that you can insert things into a bubble if the object is completely wet. So we put the dry ice in large metal bowls and ran a thin cloth (one of Heather’s silk scarves) over the top of the bowls to make a soap film. We then watched the bubbles expand from the gas coming from the dry ice and inserted things into the bubble film without popping the bubbles. So much fun! We poured water over the dry ice to make our bowls look like boiling cauldrons and finally we squirted bubble solution on the dry ice and watched bubbles form. The day didn’t have a focus, but we had a lot of fun, learned some new things, and followed up on some things we had already learned.
Heather and Jed invited us to stay for dinner so I picked Mark up at West Marine and headed back to H & J’s. Thursday night is fish night at the Goldstones in the summer because they get fresh fish from the local fish cooperative on Thursday afternoons. The fish this week was striped bass and it was delicious . . . as were the green beans fresh from the garden and the fresh pickles made from garden cucumbers. Add to that homemade black cherry cobbler and whipped cream and you have a perfect summer dinner. Thank you, Heather and Jed.
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| 130725 Day 264 Cape Cod, USA–Bubble Fun with Dry Ice |
