Graduation

My Daddy went to graduation this past Sunday. The best part about graduation is the costumes! We dressed up for a photo shoot outside. Daddy dressed as "the professor" while I dressed as Pooh. Here are some photos of our dress-up as well as pictures from our adventures in the "tunnel park" earlier in the day. Check them out here.

Day Trip to San Francisco

Yesterday, I went to San Francisco with my Mommy and Daddy. Here are some photos. It was a sunny, clear day and we took a bay cruise. I really liked all the boats. Boats were always pretty good, but since one of my current favorite books is I'm Mighty, about a small but strong tugboat, boats are even more interesting now. (I definitely could have done without the wind and the noisy loudspeaker during our boat ride, however!).

We also rode the Pier 39 double-decker carousel again-- my favorite thing in San Francisco! I named my horse "Tony" after the song "Tony the Pony," a song that was a favorite of my mommy's as a child that she has since taught me. (I am yelling, "Tony!" during the very smiley carousel photo.)

Daddy, Mommy and I also had lunch at Bubba Gump's, where they make excellent Kraft Macaroni and Cheese. Afterward, we went to The World's Greatest Chocolate Store, where I investagated all of the chocolate items looking for regular chocolate (no nuts, fillings, etc.) and we bought some yummy chocolate Golden Gate Bridges. I ate one of them as we drove home across the Bay Bridge (also a suspension bridge in part much like my chocolates).

Butterflies

I love butterflies. I have read many butterfly picture books over and over with Mommy and Daddy (i.e.,The Very Hungry Caterpillar by Eric Carle, Waiting for Wings by Lois Ehlert) as well as Caterpillar Spring, Butterfly Summer. (The butterfly pops out in 3-D at the end of this one!) I also have a butterfly hat that Nainnie bought me at Yosemite Park last July. Anyway, one of my favorite games on the couch is pretending to be a caterpillar building a chrysallis around himself (couch pillows) and then emerging from the chrysallis to dry his wings, fly and search for nectar. Many, many butterflies test their wings in our family room.

I highly recommend any books by Eric Carle or Lois Ehlert. They are great!

I lost my poor meatball

When we go to Kindergym, they always have some sort of children's music playing in the background. I immediately start grooving and have a reputation as a dancer. In fact, there is currently one raised mat area that I use as my "stage." Sometimes, Mommy and I act out the songs. A favorite game of mine at Kindergym is pretending to be the bear from "The Bear Went Over the Mountain." I climb up and over an arch-shaped piece of equipment and then hide under the arch after moving stuff over to make a door for the cave where I hibernate. This week, the song, "On Top of Spaghetti" was playing. Mommy sang along, and then I decided to be the meatball in the song.

Anyway, being a meatball involved stacking big, black tire tubes six high to be the bowl. Then Aidan the Meatball would climb out of the bowl, jump onto Mommy, roll across the floor, and hide under a giant, green pillow-like thing (an item that kids generally land on when they jump off of other things). I liked being a meatball so much that I played this game for most of the time we were at Kindergym. I even played a version for a while at the playground outside before shifting to chef mode and serving spinach souffle and pancakes. After I finished "cooking," Mommy and I played in the sand, where I became a scoop truck (front loader) by positioning a very long shovel between my knees as I walked around. Imagination is a wonderful thing.

Electric guitars in need of a plumber

Mommy and I ate dinner at Taco Bell last night at my request. (Daddy is in Chicago for a short trip.) Anyway, we were grooving to the music playing in the background until a song came on that began with heavy electric guitars. Those electric guitars sounded funny to me. I exclaimed, "Their music player sounds a little bit clogged!" Mommy had to agree in this case!

Mother's Day Photos

I had a lot of fun going to the restaurant and playing chess on Mother's Day. Here are some photos from that day.

Chess

Following our Mother's Day brunch, we visited a couple of stores in the shopping place where the restaurant, the Blackhawk Grill, was. In one of these stores was a table with a large chess set on top of it. Daddy told me it was a game and suggested we play. We had a great time with chess, and I was even more delighted to discover that Daddy had a chess set at home too so we could play there. In the days following, we've played lots of chess. I especially like the pawns, which I like to call "boys" since, compared to the other chess men, they're boy-sized like me. One of my favorite versions of chess is to build a castle consisting of rooks at the four corners and pawns forming the walls of the castle. Daddy opens the doors and then calls for the type of piece that is allowed to go in.

"White knights can now enter!" he says.

I march the white knights up to the gate to gain entry. Sometimes, the chessmen are disobedient and the wrong guys try to enter. It seems that the bishops are the most unruly chessmen.

Floats or sinks

Inspired by the science fair, we decided to run a number of experiments at home this weekend. MY favorite one was "floats or sinks". We got a bucket of water and tried a variety of different items to determine whether they float or not. This was a more systematic extension of our earlier experiments with Little People. First, we ran some replications of our earlier work. Little People do indeed float. We tried a number of other plastic people related to Little People and found that these floated as well. We then tried several other items. Here is the list:

Item: Result
Rubber bands: sink
Koosh balls: sink

which led us to conjecture that rubber items sink. But this is wrong since

Rubber balls: float

Candles: float

which led Mommy to conjecture that wax things float. But this too is wrong since

Crayons: sink

We also thought that plastic floats from our earlier Little People trials. We got some confirmation of this:

Plastic spoons: float

But this "plastic hypothesis" is wrong too since

Tony Hawk: sinks

We thought that heavy things sink and by and large this is true since

Rocks: sink
Golf balls: sink
Metal spoons: sink

Bottom line: The properties of objects that lead to floating or sinking are quite complex. More study is required.

In other experiments, we tested whether big balls or small balls fall faster. We seemed to determine from dropping them at equal heights and then checking which hit the ground first that they fall at about the same rate. Feathers, however, fall more slowly than balls of any size.

I like experiments quite a lot.

Science Fair

Today, we went to a Science Fair in Lafayette. It featured a lot of interesting things like magnetism, how batteries work, "lava" from a volcano and rockets powered by baking soda and vinegar. I loved the fair and even got to take home a new pet---a worm that turned the compost in the school where the fair took place into nice soil. I put the worm into our garden in hopes that he could duplicate that feat.

Later in the afternoon, we went hunting for Mother's Day gifts and cards for Mommy. Initially, I wanted to go to a bunch of stores (notably the Thomas store [Barnes and Noble] and the Apple Store) to play. Daddy noted that we had to "work" first to find Mommy's gift. While that seemed interesting enough intially, I soon tired of "work" and wanted to go right to play. Work is a lot harder than play. I noted that both Mommy and Daddy seemed to work very hard, but that, happily, Aidan didn't have to work much at all. It would be nice if this situation were always the case. Anyway, we picked out some nice things and I nice card for Mommy and came home. We worked efficiently enough that there was some time for playing too.

When we came home, I remembered the "experiments" in the science fair and wanted to run some of my own. Daddy seems to really like experiments. We tried several experiments in whether things float or sink. We determined that corks float and Little People (TM) float. Quarters, however, sink.