April 11, 2003
Ant Farm Demolition
My son got an Ant Farm for Christmas, and we finally got around to setting it up this week. The instructions explained that you could either send away to receive the ants in the mail, or catch your own. We decided to catch our own as we had a bad experience ordering tadpoles in the mail (they arrived dead as doornails, and on the second try, one lived but he ended up being deformed). After all, how hard could it be to catch ants?
We followed the instructions and put a jar with water and brown sugar outside. I assumed we would be swarmed with ants within 24 hours. Um, wrong! We waited for days, through torrential rains and sunshine, still no ants.
Finally, my son resorted to crawling around with tweezers and catching a lowly three ants by hand. While he was on the ant safari, I setup the farm by adding the wet sand. We finally got the ants inserted, and eagerly waited for them to get busy making tunnels and being ant-like.
Unfortunately, it appears that one ant got crushed by the tweezers because he kind of just laid flat on his back on the tunnel steps. Ant #2 seemed sluggish, and only Ant # 3 at least walked around a little. We gave up watching and, the next morning, ran to the Ant Farm to see how they were doing. Mysteriously, 2 ants were missing and only Ant #3 remained. What happened?? I could only imagine that Ant # 3 was a cannibal. By the morning of day 3, Ant #3 was also missing.
A few minutes later my son found an ant (presumably Ant #3) crawling on the floor. Unfortunately, I then had no choice but to banish the Ant Farm from our home, as the thought of escaping ants was entirely unacceptable. My son begrudginly agreed and we dismantled the farm and sent it to pasture.
April 08, 2003
Write a book for your child - it's easy!
Looking for a way to make your child think you are cool? When my daughter was a toddler, I wrote her a personalized book. Really! Using the Illustory personalized book kit, it's easy.
You don't really have to have talent to do this -- goodness knows I didn't! I simply made up a 'story' in rhyme format that included real personal aspects from the daily aspect of my child. The kit provides blank pages and instructions for how to layout the pages. I then created a very simplistic character that kind of looked like my daughter, and went to town with magic markers.
You send the pages and the accompanying text, via mail to Illustory, and they typset and bind the book and send it back to you! My daughter absolutely loved her book, which was called 'Alex's Busy Day'. She loves swimming, so here's an excerpt....
Good morning, Alex!
It's time to play.
It's a bright and sunny
day today!
Alex went swimming
and saw some fish.
They said, "Splish, Splash,
Blurb, Blurb, Swish, Swish!"