A week full of excitement

This has been an exciting week. Some of the excitement has been good. Some has not been so great. 

Tuesday, Mom's friend picked us up from school. We were expecting Mom, but she was at the emergency room with Turner. He was outside trying to make a car out of his scooter and a chair when they were getting ready to come pick us up. He stood on the chair to put his shoes on, and fell backwards. When he fell, he knocked his noggin on the cement/stone wall around our patio. Blood was dripping from his head, and he really screamed. Mom was scared and called our doctor, who told her to take him to the ER. By the time they got there, Turner was calm. They took great care of him, and he was brave. He didn't even mind when they stapled his wound shut! At the end of his visit, they let him keep the squirter they used to clean out his wound, and gave him a popsicle. Turner told mom he liked it there.

The good exciting news this week was Hazel and I won our school science fair! Hazel's project involved putting dirty, dull pennies in lemon juice and salt. She took some out after a few minutes and left the rest in for eight hours, then took them out and rinsed them. Every few hours she recorded what they looked like. Some turned green and the ones that were in the whole time that were rinsed turned shiny.

My experiment measured how quickly temperature changed when we put a 1/2 cup of sand and 1/2 cup of water (they were contained in measuring cups) in hot water. I had a good attitude about doing the work. Dad showed me how to make graphs with the results, which I really liked.

When they announced our names this morning on the school news, we were really happy! Mom, Dad and Turner came to watch us get our medals from the school principal. We are all really proud of our double win! Turner asked Mom if he can do one next year so he can get a medal too. So next year, we're going to see if we can bring home three medals! Hopefully we won't give Turner a complex by setting the bar so high.

One other good exciting thing that happened this week was a very cool Cub Scout overnight that Dad and I did. We drove to Dallas and got to spend the night in the Perot Museum of Nature and Science.

Our pack had rented out the entire museum, so right after dinner, we all had the museum to ourselves. First, we watched a really cool 3D movie about Sea Dinosaurs. We all kept reaching out in front of us trying to grab the things that came out of the screen! Then we watched a live science show. I was called up to be a volunteer and got to demonstrate how objects contract under heat. I held a rod with a metal ball over a butane torch and showed how the ball could fit inside a ring that it was bigger than just moments before. Dad was nervous seeing me so close to fire, but I did great. The show had lots of other neat things too, like freezing things in liquid nitrogen and then smashing them. Dad got mad when the woman running the show put her hand in the liquid nitrogen and then pulled it out quickly - he thought she was going to freeze her hand!

The room that Dad and I slept in

After the show, we had three whole hours to just explore the entire museum - all to ourselves! All of the exhibits that were usually full of people (10,000 visitors a day) were open to just us 130 scouts and parents. It was really cool.

My favorite things were controlling robots, riding an earthquake, racing a dinosaur, watching myself shoot a basketball in slow motion, challenging dad to a Predator vs Prey game, and looking at all of the dinosaurs. Finally, at 11:30pm, it was time to go to sleep. We got to sleep in the room with all of the dinosaurs. We were so tired from all that exploring that everyone went right to sleep.

In the morning, we had some snacks and headed back to Austin. It was a really exciting overnight.