The Wonder Drug..... And hunting for Worms!

What do you think of when you smell this stuff?

I think of my Grandma's house when I was a little girl. Vicks kind of has that connotation of being for old people. Well, I'm telling you, this is a wonder drug. Who would've thought? I discovered this in the fall when Cee-cee would cough all night long with allergies. It was horrible. I gave her Benadryl and the humidifier, but to no avail. Until, I added Vicks. That did the trick. And now, we're all sick with colds but Baby has it the worst. She is pretty phlegmy. The other night we were getting ready for bed and I just heard her cough and cough and she had so much gunk. I felt so bad, but what do you do? She's already on allergy medicine and I am paranoid of over-medicating my kids. And I don't want to take them to the doctor because I hate going to the doctor because going to their doctor is an all day affair most of the time. It takes so long to see someone, I feel like just taking a picnic and making an outing of it. So, we rarely see the doctor unless it's serious. So, anyhow. I'm trying to figure out what to do to relieve this poor child and then I had a revelation. I heard the harp music and everything. "Vicks. Use the Vicks" And so.... I smeared some Vicks on her chest, and on the soles of her feet (I heard about this from two different sources) and the child sleeps now without coughing. It's been wonderful.
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 And now for something completely different.

We did science yesterday. Gee, Kristen, you say that like you never do science. Gulp.... well, we haven't been doing a lot of science lately. At least it seems that way, but when I look at our science book, we've gotten quite a ways through it, so maybe we are doing science. And I just didn't realize it. Anyhoo! We did science yesterday.  We're studying invertebrates (that would be animals without backbones). For the past couple weeks we've done it the easy way....library books. We've studied jellyfish (cnidarians) and sea stars (echinoderms). You know, you can't find those in your backyard, unless you lived at the ocean, which would really be nice, but is not an option at this point in our lives. So, we had to resort to library books. But that was nice and clean and easy. Sit on the couch, look at the book, talk about it, label the parts of a starfish and you're done. But, now, as much as I was trying to avoid it, we are studying worms. And you can find those in our backyard.

So, here we are, hunting for worms. It was quite beneficial that I hadn't raked leaves yet, because after we brushed aside the top, dry layer of leaves and came to the bottom layer of slimy wet leaves and then delved under that.... we found worms.

We made a nice home for them to live in while we studied them.

And it was all well and good until Duh-duh had a complete melt-down and got sent to his room. You know, it's always something. But, we did find about 2 worms each and Bubba and I came in the house and looked at his worm under the magnifying glass. Today we are going to do another little set of experiments on our worms and then we will let them go back into the soil to enrich it and carry on their own little jobs in our ecology.
 Oh, and here is a gratuitous picture of our squatter kitty, aka Tabby. Isn't she elegant looking? I really like her. She's a nice kitty!