Will had some pretty detailed ideas of what he wanted to to have for his birthday cake this year, and, thanks to my right hand man, the internet, I found an amazing recipe to bring Will's concept to reality for the family dessert party.
By the way, this is really, really good (aka a million gazillion calories). Annie's Eats has given me many amazing ideas, but this one truly was inspiring (you really need to go there to see her pictures and salivate and probably gain 10 pounds vicariously.
How good was the cake? My dad doesn't like cake. He will usually have a little piece at these family parties because he is a good sport/guest, but he really just doesn't care for cake. HE loved it. And my mom, who has more discipline concerning sweets that I can even fathom kept taking little pieces after her serving was done. Seriously, if you even kindof like peanut butter and chocolate, you have to make this cake!!!
For Will's party, we had several discussions about what he wanted to do and we finally decided on a bike party with pizza. We had all the boys bring bikes to our house and Enoch set up an obstacle course at the elementary now four houses away from us. We had camouflage headbands for everyone, which they loved, and they spent about an hour playing on their bikes. Unfortunately Enoch was in charge of the live action shots, and he forgot until they were all back at our house, but we did get some post-course shots.
As you can see, they are not yet at the point where they have lacking self-esteem. We had a big Papa Murphy's double stuffed pizza and chocolate cupcakes with peanut butter cups baked in them for dessert. As far was Will was concerned, it was perfect. And the weather actually cooperated for a day.
I am of the opinion that as a parent, I need to give my children as many opportunities as possible to discover loves, passions, interests, etc. So when the science fair rolled around and Will and Ellie wanted to do projects, we started looking and brainstorming. Of course, it was held on the Friday before Prom and Ellie's birthday party.
We spent a little time on the internet. I had the kids think of things they would like to learn more about - Ellie went the music route (no surprise) and Will went the explosion route (no surprise).
Will desperately wanted to do the mentos and diet coke experiment. We had to think of a way to test the experiment and decided to go with the "which-kind-of-soda-explodes-best" idea. We have watched lots of Mythbusters and knew that we needed a guide to see which one really did explode the highest.
Dad was the photographer here. The thing with elementary science fairs is the experiments usually can't actually be carried out in the gym for obvious reasons, so we needed good documentation.
And we have our winner. Seriously, how fun is this? I mean, I kindof want to just buy soda and mentos and pick random days during the summer and blow them up...
Ellie is always one to think big and this year, she really want to make this.
You know, I may have my moments of feeling like supermom, but they never lead me to think this big. But she really liked this idea, so we watched a few more youtube videos and found this.
I figured this would be a little more manageable, on a smaller scale of course, and we decided to help her make a PVC piano.
We measured out the PVC pipes and let her hear how to match the pitch to a note on the piano, discussing shortening to make the pitch higher. We added a coupling when tuning. The coupling made just the top of the pipe a little wider, allowing us to have a way to make the pipes hang and the pitch resonate through.
Then, when we had the pitches right, she wrote the names of the notes on each of the couplings.
Enoch built a stand and drilled holes to fit the pipes and we put together the basic melodies of some well known tunes. We wanted the kids to be able to play this as they came through the fair and bought a new plastic spatula just for this. We had the necessary Twinkle, Twinkle, You are my Sunshine, and the immortal Smoke on the Water.
Ellie won the science project in her grade and it sits proudly by our piano at home, occasionally being featured as part of a PVC piano and piano duet of Smoke on the Water.
