Leprechaun tricks were very popular in our house as the kids were growing up. You never knew quite what they would do from year to year. This post was originally written in 2008 (gosh the kids look so young). I wanted to re-post it for those of you looking for some leprechaun tricks to step up your game. My kiddos still talk about this one 5 years later. Those tricky leprechauns somehow turned all the water in our faucets green this AM! The toilets flushed green water, too! It was a big mystery for a while but then the boys started to figure bits and pieces of it out. They guessed that the Leprechauns must have put green paint or something in the faucets. After a lot of fun and teasing I brought out the fizzy tablets from Steve Spangler that does this. They had fun mixing the colors...Carter did not know that yellow and blue make green...I just assumed he learned that in Kindergarten (maybe he was absent that day, lol). Connor remembered back to 4th grade where I taught him chromatography and made black with the primary colors. Thank you Leprechauns for the fun color reminder and for leaving us extra fizzy tabs to play with! ;) Leprechaun Tricks: New ...
Legend of the Cottonwood Tree Star
Today was our first park day with the homeschool group I agreed to take over here and we were lucky enough to come across our first cottonwood tree star. The people were really nice, the kids very accepting of Carter, it is just that parks here are NOT accessible....grrrrr! In any case, it was a beautiful park with hundreds of old cottonwood trees lining the river that the kids played in. Again, Carter couldn't get down to the river area but this is how we learned something new. In an effort to include Carter some of the kids went out scouting for cottonwood twigs. Did you know that if you are very lucky and you snap a cottonwood tree twig right on the lines, you can find a star hiding inside? I grew up with cottonwoods all over Arizona and never knew this. The group knew there was a Native American legend surrounding this little oddity of nature so when we came home we looked it up. According to Arapaho and Cheyenne tribes, they believed that this is where the stars in the sky come from. According to this legend, the wind sent them to the sky from the trees. There is also another legend that the stars hide there during the day. The Lakota use the cottonwood tree as the ...