Captain Jean Sparra (by sarah)

Today Alaric had to go to London to deal with servers - origonally we were going to go with him and me and the girls were going to head to the Natural History Museum but with the weather being so nice and hot I didn't want to risk having the kids stuck in a car in traffic for like half the day so we stayed here.

We inflated the pirate ship paddling pool Jean got for her forth birthday and spent a good chunk of the morning playing Pirates of the Carrabian with Jean as Captain Jack Sparrow, Mary as Will (as she is the new baby captain) and me as ever other character out of the first three films.

Then I made up stories from the the characters Mary got given as bath toys as a christening present last weekend. So we had Gianty the Giant Squid from the deepest sea trench who went on an adventure to visit a coral reef.

I offered Jean the chance to go to the park and then to Pizza Hut for lunch but she stated she wanted a picnic as Pizza Hut do not have sorrel in their salad. So I made them a picnic with home grown salad 🙂

Which the rabbit instantly joined in with!

I had to take photos before removing and washing salad (I gave him some carrots I'm not mean!)

We then had to come inside as it was too hot and we watched Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban and then Shaun the Sheep. Then it was back to the pool and bubble blowing and then colouring in!

Mary wanted to help Jean so I had to get one of Jean's old exercise books and some of the scrubbed out felt tip pens for the baby so she could colour in too 🙂

We then had dinner in the garden, followed by another paddle and then The Wizard of Oz and pop cakes.

Today scores high on the goodness scale 🙂

Mary and Jean (by sarah)

I thought I'd just do a little catch up on the girls - Mary is walking, saying Mumma, hitting people because she is teething, keeps trying to dress herself, when that fails she brings the clothes to me to dress her then once dressed she gets her shoes and tries to push the pushchair over to me. If she doesn't want something she will grab it and throw it just to show she really does not want it!

She has a favourite toy - a little hamster who is her baby, she tries to play the recorder and she loves drums. She giggles and cries at the slightest things and loves snuggles.

Jean is obsessed with acronyms especially recursive ones which she spells out and says ALL THE TIME. She is having stress attacks over where to put apostrophes when something belongs to a plural and is correcting my spelling. She has been moved up a class with some of her friends for spelling and things. She is obsessed with Harry Potter and wants me to do her hair in Hermione styles and talks in parseltongue.

She is sad science club has finished but is happy she is getting to do her dancing at school. She sings her beavers theme all the time and wants to take part in Jujistu competitions. She lies about having washed both body and teeth so keeps being in trouble and is getting sneakier about it by the day!

She has declared she wants four jobs when she is older:

She wants to be in bands (three of so she can play the drums, guitar and sing), then she wants to be a Vet as she loves animals and wants to make them better, then she wants to be an artist (specifically she wants to be the colour artist to comic book/animation line drawings and her colouring is fantastic!) and lastly she wants to be a teacher.

I have to ration the amount of time she spends reading and doing maths so she actually goes and plays - when her friends come round she organises them into bands and theatre groups and puts on shows for me.

I think that is everything currently.

Oh apart fromt he fact that Mary escapes all and any strap you put her in and has taken to posting what ever she can into the bin if you don't watch her!

Jean is picking up Lojban even though Alaric is only really speaking it to the baby and she keeps coming home saying things in Spanish and French. She is also doing her own writing ranging from poetry to stories though most of them involve Daleks.

Cake Pops (by sarah)

This is our first batch of cake pops - made as a family for a delayed May Day celebration.

I had wanted to get this machine at christmas but with house moving and stuff I couldn't.

We all had fun making the cake pops 🙂

I think they looked good as the table centre piece 🙂

Here are Jean's cake pops

Here are Alaric's Goth Pops 🙂

Out of mine there were only two good designs - black icing with purple edible glitter which I could not get a good photograph of and my topary cake pop.

I wasn't sure about the thickness of icing etc... so we had made up different thicknesses to try and we decorated some then and there and others we left to dry and decorated with icing pens and things later on!

Alaric and Jean had fun making cake pop pals for me which I filmed and will be making wiggly pet e-comic type things with the still photos 🙂

There will be more cake pops and cake pop pals 🙂 My big project is a cake pop bucky ball 🙂

Science the Universe and Everything erm… including Cake Pops (by sarah)

So I have had my eye on a cake pop machine since before christmas and have bought one for basically £20 from lakeland as the amount of ideas I am having for them means I can't sleep and Jeany wants a darleck cake for her birthday so I would have to get one then!

But I have also been thinking on science and science communication and things right so two creative things that aren't cooking have come out of this already.

One is a bizar video of the cake pop characters that Jean and Alaric made called The Gape Mouthed One and is obviously part of a series not to mention the stills I tool will be finding their way onto the Wiggly Pets blog.

Then there is a poem. It is about the way I think basically and came out of Alaric's impression of me talking just after we got the cake pop machine. I have recorded as it was only written last night and I haven't had a chance to sort out the spelling issues yet 🙂

It is called ADHD The Polymath Dream.

On top of that I have found myself looking at Science Communication courses which is probably nuts but it occured to me that I now live in walking distance of a train station that can get me at least to either London or Bristol.

Me, Science, Geekery and Art (by sarah)

I have two thirds of the funding I need for phase on of Science-Art for all. It would be great to get that last bit of money in the pot so I start work on the project.

Also I am working hard on getting Ballads of the Scientifica in all of its forms ready. In case I haven't mentioned it before I have my Science-Art website and I also have Astronomy@Geology.

I am very happy about my science-art at the moment and where it is going. I feel that art is probably the best way in which to get the general public to engage with science and communication of the ideas and concepts to EVERYBODY is of upmost importance.

Science permeates every aspect of our lives and I do not just mean medicine and technology. Food, water, our clothing - all of it relies on science. But understanding that science is important - that it is the cure rather than the disease is still being lost.

Science is still seen as a dead boring subject - but it really isn't. It uses creativity as much as any art. The wonder of everything around us - this we need to show people. There has been some wonderful popular science programmes over the last few year which are helping to instill the awe of everything in people but we are a long way off.

I use art to try and communicate emotions and concepts. And am very pleased to have had some of my work likened to Carl Sagan.

I started the Ballads of the Scientifica to help me put all of my spoken and sung science-art in one place but have found it is linked to my visual art very much.

Here it is though it is still being worked on:

But my work is still infantile compared with the group I found yesterday called Symphony of Science. Mary and Jean both love the songs - that are made out of snippets of documentaries and the like.

And then just as I was thinking about it all I turned around to find the baby now 15 months had been selecting books off the bookshelf. She had a maths book, another on electrical experiments and the last was 40 More Gadgets For the Evil Genius - the geek in me found this halarious 🙂

I do still miss the lab - though and the deeper into art I sink the more keenly I feel the lose. I want to blast rocks with military grade lasers to see what they are made of - to make element maps and to piece together the evolution of systems be they life or rock.

But this isn't doable for me - not at the moment and I am over whelmed by the wonder of the naked ape infants I have in this house ie Jean and Mary. My main hope is that I am showing them the beauty of it all and how to think for themselves.

And I do actually feel very hopeful at the moment - I have a meeting about my science-art this afternoon then tomorrow I'm performing in Gloucester.