more excursions for tinies

Charles River Museum of Industry - acting on a tip from fiddledragon, we went to see the plasma art exhibit - much of which had to be turned on, meaning "buttons that you could press that did something dramatic"! Three year old heaven. (And some of the pieces were actually interesting as art to me, too.) She also got to bang a large bell with a hammer and sit on an antique fire engine, and we had a nice little walk over the bridge and along the river to look at the dam and some ducks and a possible turtle.

Children's Museum - I've written about this before and everyone who might be interested has heard of the Children's Museum. But! What you might not know is that inside the "three and under" room there is a "babies only" area that I had never been in before, since the first time I took Junie she was already too big for it, and it's pretty cool. Big mirrors at floor height, interesting padded surfaces to crawl over like "waves" and "bars", and best of all, this big sloshy "waterbed" pit. Seriously, wow, the waterbed pit. Junie loves the baby dolls and play kitchen elsewhere in the three and under area, and so I let her go play there while Q and I explored the baby area - it's the least supervised she's ever been in a public space, but it seems to have gone okay, or at least, she didn't wander off and no angry parents came up to me with complaints, so, hey, success. (I did gopher up every couple minutes to make sure she was still there and doing okay.) In other Children's Museum news, I finally got Junie to set foot in the big climbing structure, but she didn't go more than one or two platforms in. (Yes, I am totally hoping that my wish that I could climb that thing can be satisfied vicariously through my kid. What?)

science for tinies: bigs bouncing littles, littles bouncing bigs

Help me design this experiment!

So on Wednesday at the farm Junie went on the moon bounce, and she was having fun until a bunch of big kids rushed on and started bouncing her too much, at which point it was briefly unclear whether she was going to be able to crawl to the doorway where I was reaching out for her, or whether she was just going to cry helplessly and I was going to have start a) yelling at the big kids or b) crawling in there myself with Q in the Ergo. (She made it, with encouragement.) Anyways, today she asked me "why those big kids made me bounce too much" and I said, oho, a why question about physical properties! to the laboratory! we must construct an apparatus!

My vision was that if we could make a bouncy surface, we could try resting a bigger pebble on it and dropping a smaller pebble, and then reverse them, and see for ourselves that a heavier thing can bounce a lighter thing higher than a lighter thing can bounce a heavier thing.

The biggest problem was making a bouncy surface - I tried cutting a latex glove open and stretching it over the top of a pitcher (a nice oblong shape), holding it on with rubber bands, but the cuts meant that it just ripped when I tried to stretch it. I tried using an uncut glove, wrist at one end fingers at the other, but things inevitably fell through the gaps, which was a pain. I tried putting the glove *over* the end of a jar but the fingers were in the way; I tried inverting them into the jar, which Junie thought was hilarious because now she could wear the glove and have her hand in the jar, but anything dropped on it just fell into the hole.

The other problem was that both objects immediately flung themselves off of the surface (and it turns out the larger rock, falling from the height of a pitcher, had enough force to make a mark in the corian countertop, oops. at least it didn't get our toes.). I substituted a small apple and a cork for the rocks, making them less hazardous, but still just as inclined to leap off.

In a perfect universe, I think I would somehow have two clear channels above the bouncy surface, so that we could drop an object down into one, and the other object would jump up into the other. So... can anyone help me figure out how to do something like this? Preferably using common household supplies?