I just have to refer you here — Maryann captured some million-dollar smiles of my boys on Sunday. It was horribly hot all weekend, so she and I were looking for indoor activities for our boys.
We turned them loose with some crafts, and the painting went from “let’s paint with sponges” to “let’s paint with hands, arms, lips and BELLIES!”
I’ll need to upload a picture of Timmy’s art work — a belly print, complete with belly-button hole!
So, we’ve had the ants in the farm going on 5 days, and we have some good-looking tunnels appearing now.
Unfortunately, all the tunneling is going on in “Timmy’s” ant farm, while Jake’s has something else going on…mass burials of all their dead.
I’ll tell you what! I think these ant farms are WAY more interesting than fish or sea monkeys (Jake got sea monkeys for Christmas when he was 4 and they didn’t capture his attention the way these ants are).
So here are the tunnels, up close and from a distance.
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| From 2008 03 10 An… |
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| From 2008 03 10 An… |
Jake’s side’s mass gravesites.
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| From 2008 03 10 An… |
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| From 2008 03 10 An… |
And a closeup of a pretty buff ant trucking some sand from one farm to the other:
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| From 2008 03 10 An… |
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| From 2008 03 10 An… |
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| From 2008 03 10 An… |
So here’s the plan to keep the ants in the dark…it allegedly will inspire them to tunnel more. I simply folded a piece of black construction paper in half and rubber-banded it to each of the farms. Stay tuned…I put the construction paper on at about 7pm, will remove it in about 12 hours when we get up tomorrow morning.
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| From 2008 03 10 An… |
I promise I’ll think of something else to write about real soon!
…though I have to admit that I thought there’d be more tunnels by now…I’m considering putting black construction paper over the sides during the day to encourage more in-the-dark work.
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| From 2008 03 10 An… |
Now, for those with mining backgrounds, you’ll know that what’s pictured below isn’t a tunnel, but an “adit”. A horizontal entrance with no opening at the other end.
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| From 2008 03 10 An… |
*I couldn’t help it…I did it again — name that tune!
I got the boys ant farms for Christmas this year. I had found them at Walgreen’s of all places on Black Friday and let me tell you, those Uncle Milton Ant Farms are SO cute, I also got one as a 5th birthday gift for my college roommate’s son. The kit includes a coupon with which you can send away for female worker harvester ants…or you can order them online. The weather has to be opportune before the company will ship the ants…especially when it’s cross-country, as it was in our case.
I mailed the ant coupons on the first business day after Christmas, and had nearly forgotten about it! They arrived this past Wednesday or Thursday in the mail while I was working in SC. When I got back Saturday night, we set up the ant farms, opened up the vials and let the games begin!
First of all, we assembled the ant farms and the boys asked us to mark whose farm was whose. (Or is it “who’s farm was who’s”???). So we did that:
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| From 2008 03 10 An… |
Jacob’s Farm — his name is written on the base w/ a Sharpie
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| From 2008 03 10 An… |
Timmy’s Farm
Then we randomly chose a vial of ants for each boy. Dave dumped one vial into Timmy’s…I dumped the other vial into Jake’s. I had an easy time…the ants went right in, but Dave had to run upstairs for some tweezers from his model railroading supplies to pick up the ants that wiggled out from the container and ended up on our kitchen counter. With just a slight bit of effort, we got all the ants contained.
It turned out that my vial was so easy to put in Jake’s ant farm because most of them were dead. Probably no more than 10 of the 25-or-so ants were alive. Boo. That might have been because we let them sit in the vial for too long…
But Timmy’s were alive and well, and his vial somehow ended up with two larvae, which are pictured here:
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| From 2008 03 10 An… |
I had to hop online and do a little research to figure out why the ants kept on picking up and carrying those larvae all over the place…apparently ants take turns “babysitting”, and they have to keep it fed and at the correct temperature. They keep moving the larvae from the lower level (sand for tunneling) and the upper level (fake plastic farm scenes).
Jake was quite discouraged at first at the “mass graves” — piles of ant death all over his farm.
Each of the farms comes with tubing with which you can connect more than one ant farm together, so that’s what we did:
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| From 2008 03 10 An… |
It took 2 days before the ants from one side were allowed over to the other side. Each side had posted a sentry-type ant at each end of the upper tube and kept the others from passing through. We set up the ant farms on Saturday, and this afternoon (Monday) the boys and I came home from errands and saw the following:
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| From 2008 03 10 An… |
The upper tube connects the upper halves (fake farms) and those pink specks are bits of pink sugar cookie crumbs I had dropped in on Saturday night. The lower tube connects the sanded lower halves and you see bits of sand that the ants had to clear to open up that route.
So as of Monday afternoon, the ants are freely traveling between the two farms and are working together to clear the dead ant carcasses and dig some tunnels.
Stay tuned — these farms are quite addictive to watch!
PS: Enjoy the ant tune here.
Hi! After having made several of these blankets, I finally took the time to feature one of them in a photo shoot of its very own!
I just finished it tonight and I can’t wait to ship it off to its recipient, Baby Madeline, who lives near St. Louis. She was born on Feb. 11th. Dave and I have been great friends with Madeline’s Dad for years (since grad school), and Madeline’s Mom is super-cool, too!
Yes, there’s a bit of a color changing issue here, I once again fell victim to the dye-lot: if you don’t buy all the yarn you need at once, expect color changes!
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| From 2008 02 17 Ma… |
Here’s a closeup of the pattern knit into the blankie:
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| From 2008 02 17 Ma… |
So here’s what I did for the 4 grandparents for Valentine’s Day. I bought a package of heart-shaped mouse pads from Oriental Trading Company and fit in a pic of the boys from among the “A Hard Day’s Night” photo shoot.
Feedback from 3 of the 4 grandparents is that they’re very cute and they seem to love them!
I thought I could simply take a 3 x 5 pic and slip it into the mousepad, but I was mistaken. I ended up making sure the boys were against a somewhat white background so I could cut the silouette pictures and affix them into the mousepad. I have some Post-It note photopaper with which you peel off a backing and there’s a light adhesive to keep the photo from slipping. It’s nice for stuff like this.
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| From 2008 02 10 VD… |
Timmy received a Moon Sand set for his birthday from our friends, Julie and Doug and their kids Evan and Kate. Julie recently had her kids over to play and we broke out the Moon Sand — as we saw the 7% fall to the floor (read more about my estimated 5-7% Moon Sand loss rate here), we had a discussion about the inflatable tray I was interested in. Bless her heart, she remembered and Timmy got to unwrap a set with the tray on his birthday. Yay! It’s quite nifty, with a velcro top — so after Timmy finished, it was really simple to pop on the lid and put the tray away. Probably cut my cleanup time by over 50%!
(All you Air Force-types reading this — how’s that for some action/impact statements!)
So here’s Timmy enjoying his Sand Castle kit in the inflatable tray. What a difference! The loss rate is now down to ~1%, at most! That’s a phenomenal 6% reduction in Floor Moon Sand! More fun and creative productivity for the kids! Whoo hoo!
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| From 2008 01 26 Ti… |
Tangent: Paul sent me this funny story today, and there’s a part of the story about the purchaser having to page through all these web sites that ask you to add more stuff to your shopping cart before you can ever check out (he fell for it and bought an accessory). That reminded me of what I encountered at MoonSand.com when I was trying to look for an inflatable Moon Sand play tray earlier this month. I know you’re curious — go ahead, hit the link, note how the page is laid out to try to canoodle you into buying more and more and more Moon Sand.
On Friday I took the boys to the Build a Bear store in Durham so the boys could use their Christmas gift cards from Cousin Jenn. Timmy was sound asleep when we got there, so Jake was able to go through the bear-making process on his own, and Timmy awakened right before I paid for Jake’s bear (and bear accessories). Then Timmy went through and made up his stuffed doggie.
Jake named his polar bear “Snowy” and got him a winter hat, scarf and mittens, along with Converse-all-star canvas sneakers, pants and a zip-front sweatshirt. I let the boys choose a sound box for their animals, so Jake chose the “Happy Birthday Bear” song — even though it isn’t his birthday. Jake said “It’s Snowy’s Birthday!”.
Timmy got a dog, named him “Timmy Dog” (I know, megalomanical), and dressed him in a Carolina Panthers sweatshirt, carpenter jeans and a pair of soccer cleats. He chose the doggie sounds, which include panting and woofing.
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| From 2008 01 18 Bu… |
My boys love Moon Sand. I’m not Moon Sand’s biggest fan, but I’m willing to accept the risk for the sake of happy kids who are exercising their creative muscles and (above all) are sitting still being good. I suggested to Grammy Vollmer that Timmy receive a Moon Sand play set for Christmas and she came through for us with the Neighborhood Playset. That along with some other containers of Moon Sand we had, and we have enough Moon Sand to even entertain friends who come over to play (which we did a couple weeks ago!).
(By the way, the picture of the neat, clean red and blue Moon Sand siding on the house on the product mentioned above is some sort of pipe dream — Timmy loves “painting” the house, but it would never look that nice.)
Hit the link above, check out the customer reviews about it. I feel both ways — I’m thrilled that my boys enjoy it so much, but it is indeed a bear to clean up. And even after the visible sand is cleaned up, if you walk around my kitchen barefoot for a couple days afterwards, you still feel the grit that my vacuum, dustbuster, broom and sponge didn’t quite get up. Again, an acceptable risk for the sake of happy kids, I guess.
There’s apparently this inflatble play box thing for Moon Sand. Tempting. I wonder how well it would actually work, say on our back porch or something.
So this afternoon the boys spent 45 minutes or so with Moon Sand, and even though the boys make a good effort, there’s still a colossal mess on my kitchen floor when they’re done. And since sweeping up the stuff on the floor brings along dog hair, grated parmesean cheese, crushed Cheerios and the like, there’s no way I’m putting Floor Moon Sand back in with the clean stuff. So I’d estimate a 5-7% loss of product with every play session.
I’m also a tyrant about keeping the colors separated. I know, I know, I’m probably hampering their creativity somewhat, and it’s contrary to the commericals and pictures on the packages of Moon Sand of colors, colors everywhere, but they just don’t mix nicely.
Before:
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| From 2008 01 14 Mo… |
After:
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| From 2008 01 14 Mo… |
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