Not so healthy but happy week

Yes, we are alive. The three year old recovered quickly from his puking bout, but my oldest son had a bad tummy for almost a week. Today, finally, he had a normal day with all that it entails, digestive-wise (I will spare you the details). I got a sore throat mid-week, just out of the blue; although it hasn’t gone away, it doesn’t seem to be getting worse or turning into anything bad, so I guess that’s good. Better than my legs.

After a month and a half of happy, steady running around 4 times/week, between 5K and 5 miles each time, my body finally put its foot down in protest. It started out as a dull ache in my shins (which I should not have ignored), and finally became unbearable, especially after running; a classic case of shin splints. I’ve had it before, when I was younger, during heavy soccer training season or summer running camps. In Swedish it is called benhinneinflammation (leg membrane inflammation). Two weeks of rest, and then a more carefully constructed running schedule should do the trick. In the meantime, I will be exploring the very popular low impact elliptical machine to keep the calories burning.

Although we are not in top shape health-wise, we had a fairly good week school-wise. Today we finished off the school week with something fun: we put a plain bar of soap in the microwave and watched it grow into a huge cottonball-like solid foamy mass. So awesome! Then we let it cool, crumbled it up, added a little water, banana scent and blue food coloring, mixed it back into a paste, and put it in molds to make cute little blue, heart shaped bars of soap. My friend who sometimes flirts with the idea of homeschooling one of a couple of her kids commented, “Oh wow! That sounds so cool! What were the science facts you illustrated by doing that?”

Hmmm. Yeah, well, actually we had heard that it was really cool, and so we just wanted to watch the soap grow in the microwave. Although I guess I did explain to the kids why this happened and how, the chemistry around it, and what a soap is made out of, so perhaps there’s some science there.

I suggested to William that he should wrap the soap bars in little tissue paper packages and give them out as part of the gift bags at his birthday party next week. His answer indicated though that he doesn’t think homemade, banana-scented, baby blue, heart-shaped bars of soap is something a nine year old includes in a birthday party loot bag. What a pity.