Oobleck

My girls love Oobleck and we've made it a couple of times in the past.  Bug has been asking me to make it again so I whipped up a batch and they took it outside and played with it until it fell apart.

OOBLECK

1 cup water
1.5 cups cornstarch (more if needed)

  

And that's it!  We added some food coloring to ours to make it pretty but it's not necessary to enjoy it.


I made them take the bowl outside and told them they could do whatever they wanted with it.  Needless to say they both were practically covered by the time they finished.

They asked to make it again the next weekend and this time we made a pretty green color.

The more you play with this the drier it gets so you might want to have a cup of water handy to rehydrate it occasionally.  My girls enjoyed using it as chalk when it started to dry out.
They made so much of this that we ran out of cornstarch!

My August Book Pile

I started the month of August strong with my reading and started shooting through books like crazy.  About halfway through the month the girls started back at school and my sporadic work hours turned back into daily shifts.  My writing just kind of dropped off and I had to scramble at the end of the month to finish up a few things I was forcing myself to get through.

NOS4A2 by Joe Hill was my favorite this month.  I've mentioned before that I LOVE Joe Hill.  So far my top three books this year include two by him and one by his dad.  NOS4A2 wasn't as fun as The Fireman but I still raced through this behemoth because his world-building is just so top-notch.  Christmasland was written about in such amazing detail that I could picture it perfectly.  Fun fact:  If you Google this book when you're done reading there is a lot of great fanart that bring the story to life even more.

Ollie's Odyssey by William Joyce was a close second for me which was a surprise.  Honestly I only ordered this from my library because I thought the cover was cute and that it would be a fun picture book for Bug.  Color me shocked when I get handed a giant chapter book.  I was going to just take it back but Goose picked it up one day and told me she liked it a lot so I read it after her.  The story was beautiful, about a little boy who loses his favorite stuffed toy and searches for him.  The illustrations are what put this book over the top for me.  They were gorgeous.

 How could I not love this?

I was pretty proud of myself for reading another nonfiction book again this month.   It was around 300 pages of nothing but the history of the Post Office and while I had a lot of problems with some things I still kind of enjoyed it.  History is my jam.

I am most proud of finishing off the Narnia series and finally completing Crime and Punishment which has honest to god taken me 8 months to get through.  It was a chore. 

The Chronicles of Narnia Wrap-Up

My Bug and I started reading the Narnia series this year and we powered through all seven books but believe me, it took a lot of willpower.

Neither of us liked this series to be honest.  Bug says she liked The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe but that's just because she's seen the movie several times and was able to follow along easier with the book even when the writing confused her.

I think that was my biggest problem with this series.  It seems like a Middle Grade type book but the speeches from some of the characters felt like eighteenth century classic literature.  It was really hard for Bug to tell me what the plot was sometimes.  She normally asks questions as we read and sits patiently waiting for the exciting parts but when I read these books she pretty much ignored me the whole time.  I finished the final three pages of the last book by myself because after almost seven books of this world she was just done with it all.

This is a popular classic kid series that I'm glad I was able to cross off my TBR list but I'm disappointed Bug isn't going to look back on it as a well-beloved read aloud with her mommy.

Oh well.  There's always Beverly Cleary.  Her stuff is like sugar to my kid.