Well, operation "Keep Mom Sane in February," is progressing. M is still sick, and his hanging front tooth is driving him crazy. B is recovering, but still coughs like a fog horn, and K has the fever now, she wants me to snuggle her constantly.
So, the trick with working through "Tops, Building and Experimenting with Spinning Toys," besides finding the right "readily available household equipment," when I am a dreadful shopper, is keeping K out of sharp things, B on task, and M from erupting into frustration.
We have yet to make notes in the lab books I scrounged up (maybe they are too young for lab books, maybe I’ll get them a piece of posterboard to make a chart together?). We have successfully made tops, spun them with fingers, hands, ribbons and a rubber band launcher, I have used DH’s tools, and my scrapbooking stuff (has anyone seen my hole punch? The anywhere one?) and, no one has gotten a paper cut. I don’t have a hand held mixer, or we’d use that to launch the tops too. Mom’s is too new to ask her if we can stick pencil toys into it!
Tomorrow we will borrow a stop watch from DH’s work to time our various tops, and see how the size, shape, and weight affect their spin times. Then we’ll make photocopies of the templates in the book for optical effects on top of the tops.
I think I’ll save the yo-yo chapter for another week I need to do something different.