'Tis Mercy All

Well, it's going to take more than one post to catch up on family life!

More photos and notes...

It was such a joy preparing for company - my dear friend from Iowa blew through with her husband on a whirlwind trip. To get their room ready, I got a bouquet of flowers from Costco, took it apart, and was able to make 4 separate arrangements from it, to enjoy throughout the house.

Look, look! There we are, sweet S and me. We had such a wonderful time catching up. I am so thankful they were willing to detour at our place for the night!! (oh, and EG took the photo for us)

A fun way to use some of the extra sprigs from the Coscto bouquet

EG did an experiment for school, too. Her question was Which cereal has the most added (supplemental) iron? I was really curious how this would turn out. She chose 5 different cereals, each with different percentages of iron listed on the Nutrition Facts panel.

She put a cup of cereal and a cup of water into the blender. Of course, everyone was involved to some degree. CA was all about digging marshmallows out of the store-brand Lucky Charms.

The soupy mixture is technically called slurry (oh, we all learned a lot!). By holding a magnet to the side of the cup while stirring, it's possible to collect at least some of the supplemental iron from the slurry! Yep, guys, that added iron in foods? Remember those toys where there was a face and some iron filings and you took a little magnet pen and dragged the filings onto the face to make a beard and such? That's pretty much what supplemental iron looks like.

Results - as recorded in the journal, of course: only two of the cereals even produced an iron pellet. Grape Nuts and store brand Golden Grahams produced the same size pellets, which was interesting since Grape Nuts' label said it contained 90% of the recommended daily allowance, and the fake Golden Grahams' facts said it had 50% of the RDA of iron. It was a fun experiment...you know, once I got past the project anxiety...

LC loves to be given permission to roam with the camera. Her perspective is funny. What do you think I was saying here? We'll never know for sure, but whatever it was, clearly it was very important. Ha. Oh, and AH took the next shift with the camera.