science for tinies: cabbage chem lab again

Took the cabbage pH indicator/vinegar&baking soda show on the road while babysitting a young friend. Young friend & Q mostly saw it as a fun water-pouring activity in which things sometimes happened (color changing, fizzing) but Junie was able to figure out, in a solution where there had already been fizzing, but now the fizzing had died down, that she needed to add more acid rather than base to get it going again, based on the color being greenish rather than pinkish. I mean, I had to walk her through the reasoning, but she reached the conclusion herself. Baby's first titration! (Okay, no, I guess technically a titration is quantitative. But almost!)

books: graphic novels

I read Gene Luen Yang's Boxers a couple of months ago but was waiting to post about it until I also read Saints, which I finally did. And... I don't know. Some very powerful moments, and fascinating for being a period of history I don't know much about (if we covered anything that late in Chinese Civ at Swat, I don't recall, and I'm sure we didn't go that early when we did the China unit in IB World History), but sort of unsatisfying, in the end, like I expected it to be going somewhere a little more... conclusive? Like if someone said "no actually those were volumes one and two and there's going to be a third one that finishes it" I would be all "ohhh that makes sense."

Also read Gene Luen Yang-written Level Up, art by Thien Pham, which was interesting for feeling a lot more like American Born Chinese (Yang's most famous work) while not looking like it art-wise. Well done, but, I don't know, left me a little unmoved, maybe because it didn't have a lot of personal resonance for me. (American Born Chinese packs more punch, comparatively.)

Finally, Foiled, written by Jane Yolen and drawn by Mike Cavallaro. I loved the protagonist, a high school fencing champion, but I found her putative love interest too repulsive to really buy any romantic tension between them, and the fantasy plot (this is Jane Yolen, after all) felt more like the set-up for a story than an actual story. Will definitely track down the sequel but, I don't know, I mostly found myself in the unusual position of wishing it was 160 pages of the realistic fencing adventures of Aliera Carstairs, girl fencer, without any fantasy or romance elements, when usually I eat that stuff up.