HRM Parent Blog

Halifax’s famous fog is becoming more common with the weather warming up, and there is no better way to investigate it than making your own at home – in a bottle!

You will need a clear plastic bottle with a cap, some hot water and optionally, a match. A funnel may also help, but is not necessary. Your water need not be boiling but ensuring it’s hot enough to at least see steam rising from it will help you along. Of course, be very careful when working around hot things with kids – we recommend ongoing supervision.

Pour a small amount of hot water into your bottle: a few centimetres in the bottom is plenty, and don’t worry about the plastic becoming deformed, that’s normal. There are two ways to produce a cloud using this setup. You may be able to produce fog by simply capping the bottle and squeezing it as hard as you can. Alternatively, light and blow out a match, drop it quickly into the bottle and then put on your cap.

The bottle will get warm when full of hot water, but it should be safe to touch above the waterline.

Fog is essentially a cloud that we see at ground level, and these clouds are formed through two processes: evaporation and condensation. Water transitions most visibly from liquid to gas (water to steam) at 100°C, but this process of evaporation happens in small amounts all the time when water is relatively warm (even only as warm as lakes and rivers). This water vapour in the air will turn back to tiny droplets of liquid when the air pressure around it increases sharply, or when it is given a small particle to stick to – this can happen with particles as diverse as smoke, dust and pollution in the atmosphere or even the salty spray from the ocean (that’s our infamous “salt fog”). Squeezing your bottle increases the air pressure inside, and adding a smoking matchstick offers plenty of particles for water to stick to. Both create perfect environments for clouds (fog!) to form.

If fog and April showers chase you inside, bring the family down to Discovery Centre. Our most popular exhibit ever Grossology is only here until May 13!

For more great things to discover - visit the Discovery Centre on Barrington Street in Halifax, check out their website  or join them on facebook.     

Easter is just a few short days away and for many of us look forward to this time of year to spend a bit more quality time with our families.

It's also a time for both children and adults alike to over-indulge in lots of chocolate and other treats.

As you plan your family's Easter weekend, make it a point to establish healthy traditions.  Easter provides a perfect opportunity to make healthful, outdoor family fun a bit part of what makes holidays "happy."  When your own children grow up they'll be likely to repeat traditions that bring back warm memories.

Here are a few ideas for how to work a bit of exercise into your Easter celebrations:

- Instead of chocolate eggs for your egg hunt, use hollow plastic eggs that you can open and fill with smaller treats like a handful of m&m, a few mini eggs or foil wrapped eggs or some jelly beans.  The kids will get a smaller amount of candy overall and you'll make a buck stretch a lot further.

- You can also turn your egg hunt into a treasure hunt by putting small clues in the hollow eggs, so your kids know where to look for the next one.  Bump up the activity level (and the fun quotient) by making them travel from clue to clue in a silly way, like hopping on one foot, doing the crab walk, bouncing like a bunny or crawling on their hands and knees. 

- Play Easter Egg Tag: Tie an empty Easter basket around each player's waist. Give each of the players some plastic eggs (you can reuse the ones you used for the egg hunt). Instruct the kids to try to get rid of their eggs by putting them in other player's baskets. The winner is the person with the least eggs in their basket or the first one to get rid of all of their eggs.

- Have an Easter bunny race: Substitute a potato sack for an old pillow cases for this one and get the kids to decorate them by drawing Easter eggs and bunnies on them with marker. Then get them to climb in so they have to hop like the Easter bunny and get them to race from one end of the yard or driveway to the other. If you're stuck inside on a rainy day, turn your living room or playroom into an Easter bunny obstacle course - get your little bunnies to hop around furniture and crawl under coffee tables to slow them down. Or get them to go one at a time and time them, to avoid them crashing in to each other if the space isn't big enough.

- Try your hand at Easter-egg bocce ball: An Italian-inspired Easter game, this one is played with each person receiving a colored hard-boiled egg. Take a white egg and gently toss it onto the lawn or carpet. Take turns rolling the colored eggs to see who can get the closest to the white one without touching it - or breaking their egg. For real fun, try it outside with raw eggs.

- Have an egg roll race: Maybe you can't be at the annual egg roll at the White House, but you can start your own Easter tradition at home. Each child is given a hard-boiled Easter egg. The object is to get it from the starting line to the finish line. There are several ways to roll the egg. The White House version allows the kids to push it with a spoon. An alternative is to push the egg with the feet without cracking the shell. Alternately, the kids can be instructed to get on their hands and knees and push their eggs with their noses. The egg roll can be held outside if the weather is nice, or inside if the weather doesn't co-operate.

- If you're lucky, you'll get a beautiful spring day so you can get some fresh air together. Go for a family bike ride or walk in the park. Make a hopscotch  with sidewalk chalk. Climb the jungle gym at the playground or skip rocks down by the lake.

Dalplex, Dalhousie University's main fitness and recreation facility, has been proudly serving the community for over 30 years, offering a wide variety of fitness, wellness and recreation programs and classes for adults, children, youth and seniors.  Visit their website or follow them on facebook.

by Sarah Williams of HRM Parent

My 5 year old daughter and I were strolling the aisles at Winners on Sunday afternoon when something caught her eye. 

"Look Mommy, that says I love you" she shouted.  

She's in grade primary and is near obsessed with reading everything she sees now, so was more than delighted to have spotted some familiar words in among the piles of home decor.

We went closer for a better look and I'm so glad we did.  Turns out what she saw was one of those trendy wall hangings with different sets of words or quotes on them.  They list famous street names, cities, notable dates or French cafes.  I've seen them before, but never one that really resonated with me like this one did.

Flashback for a second to earlier that day, when that same daughter was a force to be reckoned with; stomping around in a terrible mood, not being nice to her sister and yelling at all of us before melting down in a flurry of tears and a heartfelt monologue that will surely make for a future blog post about how tough it is to be a kid. 

But for now, just know it wasn't a good morning and her message was clear that some one-on-one time was in order.  She needed a few things for her room anyway, so after a quick snack and chat at the coffee shop we headed off to Winners, and that's when we saw it.  This simple wall hanging that found us both hugging each other right there in the middle of the store.

It was called "Family Rules" and while the rules are pretty simple in theory, seeing them listed out like that just made so much sense. Part of me even wondered why we hadn't already done this ourselves long ago.  It was in the cart and on our wall before we even had the rest of our treasures unpacked. 

My daughter read them out to everyone at dinner that night and we all agreed to try our best to follow them.  Even though we always say, "I love you", help each other and give lots of hugs and kisses, somehow having it on our wall as a daily reminder seems to have made it more official. 

Case in point, the next morning when our younger daughter wasn't sharing the grapes at breakfast, it was easier to point out that "share" was on the list of rules versus trying to reason with her that sharing was a good thing to do (she's only 3).  Mind you, it was with a bit of reluctance that she pushed the grapes back into the middle of the table but hey...it still worked!

Bottom line - the fancy wall hanging aside, does your family have any guidelines or rules that you live by?  Are they actually written down and did everyone have a chance to contribute and/or agree to them? Are they posted somewhere for all to see? If not, why not give it a try.  It could be some very worthwhile time well spent.

Add some Irish cheer to your house in time for St. Patrick’s Day with this easy Shamrock craft.

You’ll need:

- small paper plates

- green paint

- paintbrush

- green construction

- glue

- tape

Using a small amount of glue, secure two plates together so they overlap slightly.  Add third plate and glue to form shamrock shape.

Cut a stem shape out of green paper.

Tape the stem to back of the shamrock.

You're done!  Tape it on a door or window and enjoy. 

Happy St. Patrick's Day!

Now that cold and flu season is upon us (trust me - this year, it's a doosie), it seems a good time to jump back into the kitchen to make something homemade and comforting. It's also a good opportunity to see how germs (bacteria) can actually be helpful rather than harmful.

This experiment is to make your very own butter in your kitchen. All you need is 250 ml of heavy cream, a jar and some water.

Let your cream sit at room temperature overnight, and then refrigerate it again in the morning. Once it's cool, pour it into a jar, put on the top and give it a good, solid shake - then keep on shaking. The goal isn't to shake the jar quickly like a paint-shaker, but to give firm, regular shakes in one direction - like your ketchup bottle is running out (you can use a food processor for a less intense work out!). After a couple of minutes, you'll notice that something is clearly forming in the bottom of your jar: butter! Pour off the liquid (which is buttermilk), shake a bit more with some fresh, cold water, and pour the liquid back off. The remaining solid is butter.

Butter is a fat that occurs naturally in mammalian milk - cow, goat, etc. - and exists in some quantity in most types of milk (for example 1% milk is 1% butter fat by mass). The fat is trapped in little bubbles so that it doesn't separate, and by shaking, you've done two things to break those bubbles. First, letting the cream sit at room temperature allowed bacteria (which normally is not desirable) to grow and produce lactic acid, breaking some of the bubbles. Shaking the cream smacks the bits of freed butter fat around, breaking more bubbles and freeing more butter, which feeds a nice loop of butter-churning goodness.

Your butter will not likely be very yellow: the yellow colour of butter comes naturally from beta carotene that animals get from grass.  Dairies that use grain-fed cows add the beta carotene directly into their butter to colour it. Goat's butter is naturally white: goats turn beta carotene into vitamin A.

We hope you like learning about the good things bacteria can do. But, be sure to come to Discovery Centre while our popular Grossology: The Impolite Science of the Human Body exhibit is still here so you can also learn about some of the other things bacteria does to our bodies, and why it can make us sick. Grossology is on now until May. 

For more great things to discover - visit the Discovery Centre on Barrington Street in Halifax, check out their website  or join them on facebook.