Iveyrock

Watching my baby learn to navigate life.

This morning, Ian explained that he was evaporating water to make hail, which would ’scare away the enemies.’

This afternoon, as we were outside playing, the sky began to get dark. Ian immediately realized that the water he had evaporated had made a storm. He explained to us that he had evaporated a lot of water, and was preparing for a really big storm. With hail. And thunder and lightening. It was going to be so big, it might even break the windows, so we would need to stay back.

All of this scared Chava, who is nervous about thunderstorms anyway. I had a talk with Ian about how it probably wasn’t really going to be a big storm, and told him that we didn’t even know that it was going to rain. Ian did, in fact, know that it was going to rain, because he had evaporated water and made the storm.

Chava was still scared, so I suggested that she draw some pictures of the rain. She wasn’t interested, but Ian thought it was a great idea. He decided to take it a step further, and make himself into a thunderstorm.

He tried to rain down on people, which wasn’t working out very well. So we had a little talk about the other things rain does – falling into ponds, making plants grow, falling into rivers and running to the ocean. That led to some talk about the biggest lakes and rivers in the world.

(here he is raining down)

Sure enough, it started pouring down rain. Ian was thrilled. I am pretty sure that out of all that talk about geography and science, what Ian is going to take from this afternoon is that HE HAS THE POWER TO CREATE STORMS.

Some of our Father’s Day projects.

Should be a good one.

The kids’ project for the day: building a robot that will dig them a tunnel through the backyard, and to the Atlantic beach.

Ian’s preliminary plans

Ian is serious about this project. He has a plan for how the robot should work, and how strong it needs to be. He wants it to be able to dig for at least an hour before needing to stop for repairs. He wanted me to give him electric cords, so I suggested solar energy. He wanted to know where to get solar energy, and I told him he needed something to collect the sunlight. He thought a plant would work well for that.

Chava helped with the digging arm, and provided opinions on what the robot needed to do. They had some intense discussion about details and materials before they ever actually got to work. They spent hours on this project today, and have every faith that it will operate as designed, after a lot of work.

(pictured here is the ‘digging arm’)