Connor's 10th Birthday... Weird Science...

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So Connor had his 10th birthday party on Saturday. And in typical Connor fashion, he didn't want your typical birthday party... not even a typical theme party for a 10 year old. He decided he wanted a SCIENCE PARTY!

So Kelly, in her way, worked feverishly for weeks developing the whole thing. I was just the flunky that helped run the thing when we had it. She got cheap little child sized lab coats off EBay, made a couple of coats for the two of us, and then went to work on coming up with the "experiments" for the party. On the day of the party, we had a main lab table set up and 5 tables for the kids. Of course Kelly was the lab instructor and the kids had to partner up with a lab partner for the day. Over the course of the day, she walked these kids through experiments demonstrating engineering, physics, biology, and chemistry. Some of the things she kids did were:

• Build towers out of marshmallows and toothpicks
• Make instant snow
• Make lava lamps
• Make slime
• Construct baking soda bombs
• Demonstrate motion vs. at-rest motion with eggs
• Demonstrate a Coca-Cola/Mentos geyser
• She had also done cultures of spit, the thumbsticks of my 360 controller and the TV remote, and toes... but we didn't have time to get to those...LOL

My (and I think the kids') favorites were the Coke/Mentos geyser and the instant snow... one small ziploc bag of that stuff will make 8 gallons of snow!

On the cake, it had scientific notation all over it but was left kinda left plain on top, so we put a couple of test tubes up there, and a glass that looked like a beaker. We filled it with water and green food coloring, then filled it up with dry ice... so it did that whole "boiling cauldron", with smoke just billowing out over the top and sides of the cake. Unfortunately the pictures don't show it that well, but it was a big hit!

And Connor's favorite present from the whole day? A college-lab-quality microscope from mom and dad.... like I said.. not your typical little 10 year old...LOL

Anyway, enjoy the pictures on my Flickr account. Just click on the Flickr badge thing on my side bar to the right....