I May Have Lost My Mind!

I KNOW My Honey thinks I have. It was bad enough when one of our science project butterflies was handicapped and I hand fed it sugar water for two weeks. But I have now gone WAY beyond that. We are now down to only 3 mantids left from a hatch of about 150. The 3 survivors consist of one female and two males. My hopes all along have been that we could go from egg case to egg case so that the kids can see the entire life cycle. Of course to do this we need both male and female. I was not 100%sure of the sexes until after the final molt. Speaking of the final molt.....WOW! It was so cool! All three mantids were about 2 1/2 to 2 3/4 inches long and had small wing buds. They all molted within 24 hours of each other and immediately were a good 3 1/2 to 4 inches long AND their wings became full length and functional. After the final molt it became clear that I had 2 males and one female. The males are almost completely brown and have very thin abdomens. The female is all green, has a huge abdomen, and her head is twice the size of the males. (The better to eat them with while mating..LOL) The two males emerged from their final molt unscathed, but that was not the case with the female. She somehow managed to get herself all tangled up in her molted skin and in the process of trying to free herself, caused damage to both of her front legs and one of her rear legs. For the first week, I pretty much left her alone and figured she would figure out how to hunt as another of our now deceased mantids did who was similarly disfigured. But after a week of watching her, it was clear that she was unable to catch any of the crickets in the cage. I put her in a smaller cage by herself and began maiming the crickets before putting them in in hopes of making it easier for her to catch them. It didn't work. When it seemed that she was on her last leg I began literally placing crickets onto her half working front leg using tweezers but even this was difficult, as the crickets fought to escape and she usually dropped them. As a final straw, a friend of mine suggested I try raw hamburger meat. I did and we finally had some success!!! So this is where the crazy part comes in. I am now hand feeding a praying mantis 90% fat free, ground sirloin on a daily basis. She LOVES it and is now thriving. She has really filled out and actually seems to know what to expect of me when I open the cage. I am not sure if it is a coincidence or if insects can be trained but she actually goes to the door of her enclosure when I am in the room. You can laugh but it's TRUE! So anyway, I now have some hope that I may be able to bring this life cycle study full circle. I am crossing my fingers! I will try to get a few pictures of my three beauties and post them. It isn't easy as I am no longer able to get them out because they can and do fly and the pictures through the mesh just don't come out all that great. I will see what I can come up with. They really are awesome little creatures and we have had so much fun watching and studying them. (I may or may not be having more fun with them than the boys! :O )
I have said it before but it bears repeating.... If you have kids, especially little boys, this is a science project that is so worth the money and time. At this point you will need to wait until next spring, but I cannot encourage you enough to do this. It has been an amazing journey.

Chaos Happenings..........

Whew! Summer is such a crazy time here in the Chaos Household. We continue schooling throughout the summer as I just see no reason not to. It really takes only a few hours per day and why not just keep the schedule going year round? We are a bit more lenient but we do try to get some schooling in every day. On top of that, we have been had so many things going on.! We meet with a group of friends every Tuesday for a swim day. We meet each Wedenesday with the homeschool playgroup. We meet with another group of friends every Thursday to go bowling. The boys have Karate on Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday evenings. That is just the regular weekly planned stuff. This past week was even crazier. One of the boy's cousin from Chicago was in town. They see her so seldom and wanted to spend every spare moment with her. She is 17 and had brought a friend with her and it was her time to spend with her grandparents, so I limited the amount of time the boys were down there, but they still spent a good deal of time with them. We spent a full day out on the lake. Little Man also had Boy Scout camp on Thursday and Friday from 3-8 and Saturday from 7-1. We also did our lemonade stand. Needless to say, I was glad for the week to be over. I felt like we were running full speed for the entire week.
This week we are back on schedule and recovering from last week.
So anyway, here are a few recent pics. The first one is Muffin Man who is now missing 4 front teeth. He lisps terribly and I laugh every time he smiles. The second two are of the boys feeding the birds up in the gorge along the river. If you just slow the boat down and hold corn chips up in the air, the birds come flying from all around and take them right out of your hand. The last is of the boys riding in the tube behind the boat. They loved it!!! They kept yelling for us to go faster. At least a few times they flew over the wake and caught air! Little Man said it was better than the fastest ride at Disneyland and Muffin Man added that it was better than Disneyland, period! Who knew we could have saved so much money and just taken them out on the boat instead of to Disneyland. LOL Enjoy.

 

 

 

 

Success!

Our lemonade stand went off wonderfully! The kids had a good time and people were very generous! Muffin Man and I set up shop at about 12:30 pm. Little Man spent the morning at a Cub Scout function so he caught up with us around 1:15. By 3 pm we were back in our oh so sweetly air conditioned home! AMEN! It was 120 degrees as the weatherman had predicted. We were sweating our butts off! I brought along plenty of water and juice and we were all drinking plenty. The biggest problem was how many people gave us money and then said they didn't want the lemonade. COME ON People! Take the lemonade already! We want to go home! LOL! So in the end, we took in $183 and some change. The boys also made the front page of our local newspaper this morning. Pretty cool! We will be making a trek down to the humane society this week to give them our earnings. All in all, I think the whole thing was a great success and will sign up for it again next year if it is available. Here are a few pictures of the boys out in front of Walgreens. Enjoy.

 

 

Tomorrow Is The Day!

We have our lemonade stand decorated and our location secured. We will be selling our lemonade in front of the local Walgreen's tomorrow from 1-5 pm. I was amazed at how difficult it was to find a retailer to let us set up our stand. We asked a number of other stores before we tryed Walgreen's who was more than happy to have us. How sad is it when businesses won't even allow children to sell a few cans of lemonade to benefit charity? Here I am trying to teach my children to help others and no one would have us. Kmart refused us because they sell canned drinks and do not allow anyone to sell anything that they sell. It might hurt their bottom line. Oh Yea, I am sure there a just hundreds of people out there who would come to Kmart to buy canned drinks, see us out front and decide to buy a case of lemonade from us a $1.00 per can vs. buying the case of soda they had planned on buying. Whatever! HUGE KUDOS to Walgreens for being so enthusiastic with their response to us. We will be braving 120 degree heat to sell our lemonade tomorrow. Hopefully people will be very thirsty and I pray that we do not end up with heat stroke! Here is a picture of our decorated stand. We will be raising money for the Humane Society. Wish us luck!

 

Awesome Charity Fund Raiser

A good friend of mine sent me the below attached link yesterday afternoon. It is for a company that is marketing a new, natural, no fructose corn syrup, fruit drink line. They are hosting what they call The Pink Lemonade Brigade. My only disappointment is that I did not get this information earlier as I would have loved to get it out to others before the cut off date, which is today. How it works is this...... You sign up on the website and choose a charity of your choice. We chose the local humane society. The company then sends you everything you need to set up a lemonade stand, including heavy duty cardboard stand, paint pens, company stickers, and 100 cans of their pink lemonade, All For FREE! The only stipulation is that you must sell the lemonade on June 21st and then give all proceeds to your chosen charity. That is it! How cool is that? What a neat way to get the kids involved in doing a bit of charity fund raising. Had we had a bit more time to think about it, we might have chosen a different charity, but I needed to get our registration in and the humane society is a good cause. I wanted to choose a local charity so that the kids could actually hand deliver the money we earn. Little Man wanted to give to a charity that deals with sick children but I am just not aware of any that are local. We are anxiously awaiting our delivery so we can get started on designing our stand. We are going to go down to the humane society on Monday and talk with them and see if they have any literature or posters that we can incorporate into the design. We also need to speak with a few of the local stores to see if they will allow us to set up in front of their entrance. The website suggests doing this to maximize selling potential. Two friends in town are also participating and we are hoping to get the newspaper to come and take a few pictures of all the kids at work on their stands. The boys are really looking forward to this activity. I will make sure to post photos of our stand creation and selling day as they occur.
http://www.drinkcrayons.com/pinklemonadebrigade/