Happy Easter Science!!!

Who'd have thought a religious holiday would be so conducive to learning about science??

But we learned by experiment last year that leaving eggs in a water-and-vinegar solution degrades the shells, and we applied that knowledge to do a better job on our egg-coloring adventure this year!!!







(I'm including pictures even though we discovered over Christmas that it's actually funnier when you screw it up than when it works...)

The other fun science experiment involved our easter chocolates. There's a tradition in France of having chocolate fish for Easter (it's related to that whole eating fish for Lent, explained here), and this tradition has extended to having chocolate versions of all sorts of sea animals, such as cetacians and crustaceans. So since my kids are really into dolphins, whales, and sharks these days, we were hoping to find them some chocolate dolphins, like we found when Nico was a baby:



But what we found was better: chocolate dinosaurs!!!

I think the theory behind the chocolate shops selling chocolate dinosaurs for Easter is "to hell with tradition, let's just make Easter chocolates in any shape we think kids might like..."

And my kids were thrilled!!! Nico got a stegosaurus and Leo got a Triceratops:



The science came in as soon as Nico noticed that his stegosaurus was actually made of two pieces tied together with a ribbon with other chocolates inside!!! He immediately wanted to investigate to determine what his dinosaur had eaten. So he carefully untied the ribbon, looked inside, and had me tie it back up again.

Then I asked Nico the results of his research on the diet of chocolate dinosaurs. He explained that his dinosaur had eaten lots of chocolate eggs and chocolate fish!!! :D