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We spent most of the morning playing with Jelly Crystals (cross-linked polyacrylamide crystals). Evie made up all sorts of experiments involving color mixing, different amounts and temperatures of water, different stirring methods etc. We now have little bags and cups full of colored, jiggling goo decorating the living room. We had played with them before and let a bunch dehydrate again. They had grown mold on them and the mold ended up being like a nucleus when we re-hydrated them, weird!

We played book store for a long time. Evie took out all her non-fiction books from upstairs and categorized them using various methods to create a very nice book and movie store. I pretended to be different people looking for different things. She loved trying to help me with my outrageous requests. It was fun to watch her think about how to set it up do all Magic School Bus books go together or do all dinosaur books go together, even the Magic School Bus ones? She set up a whole section about "living people" (culture anthropology, essentially) and a whole different section about physical anthropology (dead humans). This was seperate from her general archaeology section and her paleontology section. Books on fossils went near the dinosaur section but books about the lives of dinosaurs when they were alive were kept separate. When I asked for books with magic in them I got one fiction book about fairies, several Magic School Bus books and a book about butterfly metamorphosis because "that is the magic in nature." Very cool!

We went to the comic book store again and Evie bought a collection of origin stories. We proceeded to devour them together. I cannot get over how much real life stuff--facts-- are in comic books. For example, there was a description about a certain kind of fish that helped Aquaman in one of his adventures. It said that the Drum Fish made a throbbing noise involving its air bladder. We looked it up thanks to Google and found that the description in the comic was essentially exactly the same as we found on the fish website--furthermore, they live in WI! There was another comment about the "3 billion people on earth." Evie stopped me and said "when was this one written, there are 6 billion people now. That means the population has DOUBLED since this was written!" There was a plotline involving Southern Rhodesia as well. Evie knew this used to be what Zimbabwe was called. That led to another discussion about colonialism and political boundaries and the changes in "facts" over time. Between Carmen Sandiego and comic books who needs school!

A day well lived!