Multitude Monday - a Faith Parable and #510-530

A sailor was telling a small boy about the sea. He mentioned the wind. “What’s wind?” asked the little boy. “I don’t know what wind is,” replied the sailor, “but I know what it does when I raise a sail.” We now know a lot about how to chart the wind’s course, but we still can’t see it; we can only see what it does. So it is with God’s Spirit. We can’t see it; we can only see what it does in the lives of those who put their trust in God. The winds of God’s grace are always blowing, but we must raise the sail of faith if we want them to propel us toward deeper peace and joy. Prayer is lifting our sails to the winds of God’s wisdom and power. We do not tell the wind which way to blow. We learn how to adjust our sail to the wind so it can propel us in the right direction. In prayer we do not tell God how to act. Instead, we lift our praise and concerns so God can fill us with a deeper sense of God’s presence and help us steer toward the answer God has in store for us.

A Faith Parable, taken from The Heart of Wisdom

#511. yet ANOTHER holiday today - one last gift of a day before it's back to
"normal"

#512. spending a Sunday afternoon with a friend

#513. empathy

#514. Martin Luther King, Jr, and what his life meant (and means) to so many

#515. sweet stories shared with my six year old... I thought he was getting too
"big" for these stories and he pulled them out last night and just loved them all over again!

#516. a good Sunday evening roast dinner with our family

#517. finding pictures on the computer that I didn't know we had (must have been taken by my nine year old with her camera -- love it!)

#518. stuffed animals! Our house is littered with them, but it seems each one holds a special memory.

#519. Coco Rice Krispie treats!

#520. our budgeting tool, Mint.com - It is really helping me to see what I am spending and how the budget looks. We are making such huge progress this way!

#521. pink, fuzzy bathrobes

#522. knit socks

#523. my brother and sisters, who I either text, email, or talk to on almost a daily basis. They are 18, 12 and 11 years apart in age from me, but we remain close.

#524. the "tickle gloves", and the way my son's face looks when he attacks us with them

#525. my SLOW COOKER!

#526. Netflix instant streaming - what an awesome resource for our homeschool!

#527. a homeschool mom who shared her faith story with me this week

#528. tickets to The Blue Man Group this week - can't wait!

#529. Free babysitting while my husband and I are at The Blue Man Group!

#530. spending the afternoon yesterday learning to knit.... now I know how hard it was for my nine year old!

Science Sunday - Hard to Change Science Trick

Since we were stranded at home all of last week, I was trying to come up with more things to do than usual. Both of the kids asked for Pop Bottle Science, one of our favorite resources! The trick we found was "Hard to Change".

What you need: an index card, a pop bottle with the top removed (ours is a bottle with the top 1/3 cut off, but I bet you could any jar with a wide mouth), and a quarter

What do you do?: Put the index card on top of the pop bottle. Place a quarter on the index card.

Flick the card with your finger so the card flies out from under the quarter. The quarter should fall into the bottle (this took a little practice with my six year old).

What's going on? You are demonstrating inertia, a property of all matter, which is matter's tendency to remain at rest even when the matter is made of billions of moving molecules.

I left everything on the dining room table, and everyone has been doing the trick as they walk by this week -- I always throw out the word inertia, and I think it's burned into their brains by now!

Resource: Pop Bottle Science

It's pure bottled magic! A complete kit that ingeniously marries science and fun in the breakthrough vein of The Bug Book & Bug Bottle (1.7 million copies in print) and The Bones Book & Skeleton (1.65 million copies in print), Pop Bottle Science presents 79 easy, hands-on experiments that probe the worlds of chemistry, physics, biology, geology, weather, the human body, and even astronomy.

The Pop Bottle bottle is a perfect miniature science lab--see-through, flexible, air-tight when necessary, made out of a durable, shatter-proof plastic and designed with a removable top that doubles as a funnel. The Pop Bottle book is a lively, fully illustrated 96-page guide to astonishment. Each experiment begins with a challenge and ends with an explanation of the scientific principles involved. Kids can design a volcano and watch it erupt. Create a tornado-maker and see how twisters work. Make quicksand--is it solid or liquid? Observe photosynthesis in action. Simulate Jupiter's giant red spot, investigate buoyancy, demonstrate inertia, and discover the Bernoulli principle--which allows planes to fly. Plus, turn the bottle into a barometer, a thermometer, walkie-talkie, trombone, compass--or groovy lava lamp.

Please check out other science experiments at Adventures in Mommydom - and try a fun science experiment with your kids today!