Friday, April 29, 2011

Royal Wedding

Here we are watching the Royal Wedding at 5 AM.

Monday, April 25, 2011

Monkey Crossing


According to Wiki:
The first jungle gym was invented in 1920 and patented by lawyer Sebastian Hinton in Chicago.It was sold under the trademarked name Junglegym. The term "monkey bars", was first documented in 1955, though Hinton's initial patent of 1920 appeals to the "monkey instinct" in claiming the benefits of climbing as exercise and play for children, and his improvement patents later that year refer to monkeys shaking the bars of a cage, children swinging on a "monkey runway", and the game of "monkey tag". Hinton's father, a mathematician, had built a similar structure from bamboo when Hinton was a child; his father's goal was to enable children to achieve an intuitive understanding of 3-dimensional space through a game in which numbers for the x, y, and z axes were called out and each child tried to be the first to grasp the indicated junction. Thus the abstraction of Cartesian coordinates could be grasped as a name of a tangible point in space.
Hinton's second prototype jungle gym is still standing at Crow Island School.

Sunday, April 24, 2011

Easter 2011

Did you know according to wiki:

Bringing Easter eggs seems to have its origins in Alsace and the Upper Rhineland, both then in the Holy Roman Empire, and southwestern Germany, where the practice was first recorded in a German publication in the 1500s (early 16th century).[5] The first edible Easter Eggs were made in Germany during the early 19th century and were made of pastry and sugar.[citation needed]

The Easter Bunny was introduced to the United States by the German settlers who arrived in the Pennsylvania Dutch country during the 18th century.[6] The arrival of the Osterhase was considered one of "childhood's greatest pleasures", similar to the arrival of Kris Kringle on Christmas Eve.

According to the tradition, children would build brightly colored nests, often out of caps and bonnets, in secluded areas of their homes. The "Oster Hawse" would, if the children had been good, lay brightly colored eggs in the nest. As the tradition spread, the nest has become the manufactured, modern Easter basket, and the placing of the nest in a secluded area has become the tradition of hiding baskets

Monkey Bars

Easter 2011

Easter weekend we spend in Michigan. The egg hunt was once again really fun. The girls had a blast and Isabella learned how to cross monkey bars... video to come.