Creme Brulee

As we were moving into here, we remembered that Evan had, long ago, bought a cooking blowtorch and ramekins for making creme brulee. Declan was very keen to try it out with me, so this afternoon we made creme brulee together. He wasn't entirely impressed that I insisted on making the custard from scratch - with an actual vanilla pod! (instead of buying it ready made), but loved the chance to torch the brulee, and the delicious result.

I suspect in future, though, Callum will revert to being our usual Saturday afternoon pastry chef.

Gerric

For the first time in a while, the boys did Gerric courses at the UNSW this week. They were three full days, so a bit of a commitment. Declan did a course called Budding Chemists. Highlights for him were getting to use a bunsen burner, and managing to get sulfuric acid spilt on his shorts. I don't think it was quite as good as he was hoping (so not quite good enough to make up for having to get up early three days in a row).

Callum did a course in web animation, which he absolutely loved. He has made an animation of the Titanic, which I will put up here once it is emailed to him (sadly the files he brought home with him didn't quite work). He was particularly excited as one of his classmates loves both Minecraft AND Team Fortress 2 (Callum's two favourite games) so they did a bit of minecraft together when they got home in the evenings.

A fish called Nessy

Declan has been agitating for a pet for quite a while. After considerable back and forth discussion, we agreed on a fish, as long as he looked after it by himself.

He did a lot of research as to which fish was the easiest to look after (or perhaps the hardest to kill), and settled on a Siamese Fighting Fish, which in the wild lives in the rice paddies of Thailand, so will hopefully cope with water that isn't enormously clean.

Declan has named his fish Nessy, and we are having to restrain him from feeding it too often.

Maths in the holidays

During our holidays, we've had a surprising amount of maths. First, Callum was a bit bored during our first night at a pizza restaurant, and decided to work out the relative areas of the different pizza size options - his workings are shown below.

Callum's pizza workings

It was a good lesson in the practicalities of differences between the diameter and the area of a circle, as Callum realised that some of the numbers he had come up with were pretty difficult to square, and even harder to take the square root of.

Next, on the Milford Track, as we were coming down the McKinnon Pass, Callum decided we needed a topic of conversation to take our minds off how tired our legs were feeling. So I explained Bayesian probability to him. He was sufficiently interested in its counterintuitiveness (and hence the opportunity for tricking people with problems) that he decided to read the book I got one of the problems from: Thinking Fast and Slow, by Daniel Kahneman.

He's now becoming quite dangerous as he tries to use the behavioural economics insights to persuade us into things we don't really want to do.

Declan learns algebra

And finally, not to be left out, Declan decided to learn algebra using DragonBox. He demanded algebra problems from all of us, as we went back to the same pizza restaurant for our last night in Queenstown.

In a real breakthrough for him, we gave him word problems (which he hates) and he suddenly realised that he could convert them into algebra, before solving them, and his hated problem of "if you are travelling at x km an hour, how long will it take you to go y km" became ridiculously easy using his new tools.

But really, I had to write this post as I found it so amusing that they used exactly the same page in their restaurant colouring book to work out the answers!

Holiday in NZ

We've just had a lovely holiday in New Zealand. For the details, see our other blog here.
Callum and Declan rose to our somewhat exercising holiday very well, managing the challenges of a 53km walk and 150km bike ride at least as well as most of the adults they were with.

Interestingly, they were both very keen to come home, having become quickly attached to our new house, and their own rooms. Declan, in particular, wants to continue his decorating project.

Measurement

As is traditional, we have measured the boys on New Years Day (checking out old blog entries, it is rare we actually remember to do it on the right day!

Callum is 144 cm and 41 Kg, and Declan is 137 cm and 35Kg. They've both added more weight than height this year, so I can see I will have more company in my running program next year!

Happy New Year!

In our first New Year in our new house, we didn't have the views to justify a party, so we had a nice night in for the four of us. We let the boys stay up until midnight, and they put together their own Minecraft fireworks display (just before midnight so as not to distract from the main event).

Callum designed the fireworks, and Declan designed the machine gun to fire the fireworks. Sadly the screen shots don't show the cleverly designed viewing platforms and Minecraft landscape which we toured shortly before the fireworks were set off.

Declan was barely awake by the end of the real fireworks (which we managed to stream to the TV, as we don't have a working TV aerial - in the modern world, internet access is enough), but awake enough for all of us to wish each other a Happy New Year and go to bed.