He and his older brother purchased (with previous gift money) a fancy “Ninjago” (Ninja + Lego) ship called “Destiny’s Bounty” and we agreed to put it on a cake for Andrew’s birthday.  It turned out great!

Here’s a photo of the cake with two candles (whose numeric values add up to eight. Yes, we are a nerdy crew here):

To mark the occasion, in addition to receiving a few store-bought gifts, Andrew collaborated with my wife to make a homemade Ninjago shirt.  His brother did the same, and both proudly donned the shirts once they were ready today:

As much as ever, we are grateful for this sometimes-quiet, often thoughtful, and frequently in-his-own-happy-place contemplative son of ours.  May the Lord continue to bless him and use him as a blessing in the lives of others in the coming year.

3-month-old Nathaniel in Flannel:

And sporting his dad’s alma mater:

They love my Angry Birds jammie pants

They love to play (when we let them) on our phones.

They loved it when Lois made them Angry Bird plush toys.

So it was no surprise that my oldest (nearly 10yo son) cracked up when I told him about a comic strip I’d seen on a blog about “what really happened at Stonehenge”:

Now, remember, I only ever described the comic strip as a mingling of an image of Stonehenge “before” and an Angry Bird flying mid-air toward it.

I did not show him the picture.

Again: I did not show him the above picture, nor go into great length describing it.

He’s learned about Stonehenge from history lessons Lois taught.

So imagine my shock, surprise and delight when my two older boys showed me this drawing they came up with entirely on their own:

What was really shocking was that they drew the above using nothing more than Microsoft Paint.

As in the most basic computer-based drawing program in the world in MS Windows (for our Angry Bird loving Hawaii-based blog readers who are also Mac afficionados).

Wow.  Wow.

So cool. Had.to.share.

This is what is called “delight-directed learning.”

This experiment involves dissolving the egg shells with vinegar, hence the name “naked egg.” You are then left with the egg white and yolk encased in a semi-permeable membrane.  We then put one naked egg in water and another one in corn syrup to learn about osmosis, which is the process of water moving from more concentrated to less concentrated solution.  In the water solution, the egg expanded as the water moved inside the egg whereas in the corn syrup solution, the egg shrunk as the water inside the egg moved out.  After this, we reversed the process by putting the imploded egg in the water solution to expand it and the fat egg in the corn syrup solution to shrink it.  The results were fabulous and fun to play with.

Without further ado, here are  pictures documenting our experiment.

Here is the egg sitting in the vinegar solution, and as you can see, the shells are already dissolving and releasing bubbles.

After two days of soaking, the shells are completely dissolved.  To the left is the naked egg and to the right is the normal egg.  As you can see, the naked egg had already expanded and is larger compared to the regular egg.

The kids then took turns handling the naked egg and bouncing it gently.

After some fun, we put one naked egg in water solution (we added red food coloring to the water) and another in corn syrup.  After soaking for about two days, here are our shrunken and fat eggs.  Very cool, right?

We reversed the process by putting the red, fat egg in the corn syrup solution and the wrinkled egg in the water solution and let them soak for about two days.  Truth be told, we forgot about these eggs as they sat in the refrigerator so they sat in the solution for many days.

Our red, fat egg shrank.

Our shrunken egg is now revived and plump.  Because it was in the red water solution, it too became red (though a lighter shade than the first).

Once again we played with the eggs.  I dropped the fat egg in the bowl and it instantly popped as there was a lot of water content inside the egg.  The red blob to the right of the egg yolk is the membrane.

The kids took turn feeling the membrane and squishing the egg yolk out.

Now, on to the shrunken egg.  Here is Bethany feeling it and checking it out.

We bounced the egg from various heights to try to pop it.

Look at this boy’s hand!  That’s the perfect free-throw hand motion for basketball.  He was trying to score and he did.  The egg finally popped after many abuses from these kids.

Due to the low water content inside the egg, it was much harder to pop it.  And of course we have to mess with the insides just to see.

They sure love the gooey mess.  I was actually quite relaxed about this mess, only because it was well contained.  You see, this is the solution to everyone’s happiness.  Mess = happy children.  Well contained mess = happy mom.  When you have this combination, you have one happy family.

The aftermath of our much abused eggs.

For the conclusion of our experiment, I here present NATHANIEL!

His older brother thought it was cool to put an camouflage bandanna on him.

You may wonder what Nathaniel has to do with our experiment.  Well, nothing really.  It really doesn’t have to make sense.

My blog, my call.

That said, I posted his pictures for the following reasons:

1. My island-dwelling friend Andrea thinks he is cute so this is primarily for her viewing pleasure.
2. These pictures share the same memory space in my camera as the experiment.  I’m all about equality here.
3. Blogging is harder to come by these days due to sleep deprivation so squeezing everything I want to say all in one post is ideal.
4. Hmmmm. . . . I ran out of brain cells to actually say something.

Oh wait, few of my brain cells have returned.  We now have a nickname for this child!  We didn’t have troubles in the past coming up with nicknames for our children, except for Nathaniel.  For some reason we just didn’t have a good one for him, and once again I attribute it to brain cell depletion.  Before I reveal his real nickname, I must tell you about my failed nickname.  I affectionately call him “Man-Child.”  Notice that i used the present tense for “call” instead of past tense?  It’s because I still think in present tense and not willing to let go of this nickname.  I tried to convince the family that this name is biblical.  After all, biblical matriarchs and patriarchs call their sons man-child.  It’s gotta be in the Bible somewhere.  The family ignored me at first, not saying anything positive nor negative.  They eventually moved into the stage of frowning upon hearing this name.  They have now moved to the final stage of declaring this nick name as weird.  I think they’re really saying that I’m weird and to which I say. . . too bad I can’t argue against that.  Man-child isn’t sticking so we have to move on though I’m still holding out hope.

So my husband has the winning nick name of CHEEKS.  Nathaniel is all cheeks and we absolutely love those droopy, squeezable, and plumply cheeks.  Everyone in the family approves.  Even I have to succumb to such a cute nickname.  So, there you have it, a window into my scattered brain.

He doesn’t seem to mind being in a laundry basket.

Here’s Nathaniel in the snuggler I made for him.  This snuggler works so well and he is quite content and warm all bundled up.

Our regular routine still goes on though at a much slower pace.  School is still in session with daddy as the substitute teacher.  It’s been wonderful to have him home for a month.  He is my substitute teacher and my caretaker.  I’m very grateful and blessed by him.

When Nathaniel makes a peep, there’s always someone who is more than willing to hold him and comfort him.  Here is his big brother holding him while doing schoolwork on the computer.  He is quite good at multi-tasking I might add.  It’s so heart-warming to see how everyone cares for this little dude.

About to board the van home:

But not before one final “Ding family tradition” pose:

And one more up close:

Below is a picture of the books we’re reading.  Russ Ramsey’s Behold the Lamb of God is a narrative account of events from the Old Testament to the coming of Christ.  We really appreciate Ramsey’s narrative account of the story as it helps both adults and kids to better comprehend the coming of Christ.  We purchased the bundle package which included Andrew Peterson’s Behold the Lamb of God CD.  We’ve been listening to this CD continuously and we absolutely love it.  If you’re interested, you can listen to the whole album online for free.  Interestingly, Christianity Today did an interview with Andrew Peterson recently about his music and books.

For several weeks now, our family has been engrossed in Andrew Peterson’s first of the four books On the Edge of the Dark Sea of Darkness.  And yes, it’s the same Andrew Peterson, the singer and the writer.  I admit, it took me a while to make that connection.  We like this book a lot as it is both humorous and adventurous.  Some parts of it are just goofy, and we love goofiness.  The four-book saga has the flavor of C.S. Lewis’s Narnia series.  It’s definitely worth reading.

Our Advent candles.  The candle arrangement is very simple.  I arranged four purple/reddish tapered candles on the outer perimeter inside a tray and I placed the one white candle in the middle.  To make it prettier, I put our Christmas tree trimmings around it.  It’s nothing super fancy but visually pleasing.  The tray works out really well because we can easily put it away after our nightly reading so the children don’t play with the arrangement nor the fire if left permanently on the table.

Lastly, our Christmas tree!  Last year we trekked into the mountains to chop down our perfect tree and it was such a wonderful memory.  We thought we would continue this tradition, but after we found out that Costco has Noble Fir trees for a good price, we decided to do the easy way.  Instead of traveling 45 minutes into the mountains, we drove 10 minutes to Costco to pick out a cheaper and better tree.

Tonight we started our annual Advent reading and the book we selected is Bartholomew’s Passage:  A Family Story for Advent by Arnold Ytreeide.  This book is the sequel to our last year’s reading, Jotham’s Journey by the same author.  In addition to this book, we’ll be reading Russ Ramsey’s book, Behold the Lamb of God:  An Advent Narrative.  We are still anxiously waiting for this book’s arrival.

At the start of the reading, we lit our first purple candle.  There are 5 candles total: 4 purple and 1 white.  We light the first purple one on the fourth Sunday before Christmas, and the second one the following Sunday, and so forth.  On Christmas day, you’ll have all four purple candles lit in addition to the one white one.  The kids love lighting and snuffing out the candle(s) and each child takes turn lighting every evening.

To make our tradition a bit more fun, we decided to give each child a new set of PJ’s (Thanks to Target’s Black Friday sale!)  They were really excited in receiving new jammies and with giggles and smiles they got changed into them.  After that, they settled down and got started with our Advent reading.  We look forward to each night just being with one another, reading a chapter from the books, and savor the joy of the season.