Halloween Alchemy

Kana here.  It's time for more hilarity with me and Lily!

So the human's be frantically prepping for a Harry Potter themed craft fair in December (which means the human sized bookshelves now have doll-sized chocolate frogs and pumpkin pasties and wands everywhere.  And potions.  And potion ingredients.  Enough that we finally set up a little alchemy and potions show of our own.  We've got a workstation, a desk for doing all the paperwork that comes with running a shop, and lots and lots of shelves for potions.

Total number of individual little bottles in our shop:  about 300

It all started with this little shelf the human found on the side of the street for free.  It's supposed to be a wall display cabinet, and it has nice iron scrollwork on the door and sides.  And it's perfect for the massive number of potion ingredients.

Lily, being Lily, did not label anything.  So only she knows what everything is, and what goes with anything else without being a hazard.  Thank you, Lily.

We also got a new rather large mortar and pestle set (it's the Outlander Megamini kit from Amazon).  Pretty sure the human thought it was going to be smaller than it is.  We us it anyways.

More potions.  And bottles of sparkly fairy dust.  And racks of ingredients.  All the potions can be worn as charms.  We should make more.  Or rather, Lily and the human should.  I'm just going to watch the hilarity.  The last time they made potions, they stripped the finish off the new kitchen counters.  Oops.

The cabinet of completed potions.  Also unlabeled.  Just...uh...don't touch anything?  Some of the ones on the bottom might be poisonous.  (No, I don't know which book Lily is using to brew these.  Neither does anyone else.)

We also got new portraits taken in the shop, and I think these are our favorites so far.  We'll start our potions business after I make Lily label everything.  I swear.

School Supplies: book report reading

Lily here.  Nothing says fall and school quite like required reading and book reports.  And an awful lot of those required books seem to be Newbery award winners.  We have, over the course of the year, acquire our set of the human's favorites from when she was a rather small human.  (Or, in some cases, a medium or mostly grown human).

Theses are the set of historical fiction/slice of life books, because in some cases ('Miracles on Maple Hill' and 'Thimble Summer') the books were contemporary fiction when they were published.

The human has a special fondness for books by Lois Lenski (partly because they were impossible to find in libraries).  She's best know for her two Newbery books these days, but her portfolio includes the books on regional American in 1940s, which gives a very different sense of life in the US since they cover things like prairie schools, sharecroppers, and migrant workers.  Usually not covered in history class, at least not from a 'here's how they would have lived' perspective.

If you haven't read any of these before (and I don't think 'Thimble Summer' or 'Miracles on Maple Hill' are among the more popular Newberys these days, you should find a copy and do so.
In 'Thimble Summer' a girl living on a farm during the Great Depression finds a silver thimble while swimming in a nearby creek and wishes on it that life might be better.  The book covers her life and how it changes for the rest of the summer.  In 'Miracles on Maple Hill', a girl and her family move to maple farm in hopes that the quiet environment will help with her father's PTSD.

And finally, 'Charlotte's Web'.  Complete with illustrations.  We're sharing this with you so you don't have to pay the absurd Ebay prices for it.

Get your copy of 'Charlotte's Web' here.

Instructions

The Science Library

A science classroom/laboratory

Kana here.  By now you must be wondering what we did with all those science books.

Lily generally behaved like a normal person and used the books for her research projects.  Even if she does complain on a daily basis that there's not enough magical theory in science books.

Shep and I, on the other hand, only have so much patience.  There's the obligatory science fair projects, to be sure.  And making fancy models...

But we have so many of these books...

Lily:  Guys, whatever you're planning, stop it.

And that is what we do with 101 science books.  Dominos.

As an aside, the human's husband walked in while this was being set up.  He stared at us and walked back out without saying anything.

You have to admit, it's pretty impressive.

Utter chaos

Not even caused by the furry menace this time.

School Supplies: Worksheets

Aren't we done with homework yet?

Kana here.  The human might be done with school (and after a combined 21 years of various schools, she had better be done), but we dolls are in the never-ever land of perpetual youth.  And that means we get worksheets during the school year.  Not that any of us bother to do them...

The worksheets fit perfectly inside the folders from last week.  And the folders have a blank spot for writing the subject, so you can even keep track of which worksheet needs to go where.  There's 45 worksheets in all, which is more than enough for a classroom (for a day, at the very least)

Get the worksheets here.

Science worksheets on all sorts of subjects

Social studies, geography, and history worksheets

Math worksheets, everything from simple addition to fractions

Reading, writing, and spelling (no book reports...yet)

The Science Library: Electricity, Energy, and Technology

And last but not least we're covering electromagnetism.  Well, not in quite so many words, and certainly not with Maxwell's equations.  Just the basics of voltages and currents and resistances.  Nary a word on capacitors or inductors or transformers or how electricity and magnetism are really just the same thing and electric currents can induce magnetic fields and vice versa.  The human may have spent WAY TOO MUCH TIME in school learning about this.  Or at least she has a piece of paper that says she did.

And that leads us to other forms of energy and how energy can be transformed from one type into another, and really, everything is just waves and radiation.  We're not going to go into photons and how light is a particle and wave at the same time because that's really weird and mind-boggling but it works somehow.

And finally finally, the technology of the future.  Sadly, we do not get a detailed set of textbooks on computer science and computational theory and computer architecture and compilers and all that stuff that tells you how those magic chunks of metal and plastic really work and how to break them.

So one hundred and one science books will have to do.

School Supplies: Folders and Magazine Holders

Kana here.  It's October, and school is in full swing, which makes it a good time to add some organization to a desk for the invariable stacks of papers to deal with.  In our case, we had all those activity books and vintage magazines on space travel and were running out storage space for everything.

So we had the human make us some magazine holders.  And some folders for good measure.  You can see on the desk how all the magazines fit inside.

Magazine/Folder Holders

Doll Folders

The Science Library: Physics

We're finally covering Newtonian physics now (also known as the human's least favorite area of science), with the three laws of motion and simple machines and gravity and forces acting on objects.  No theory of general relativity or quantum mechanics for us.  Just good old f=ma, objects in motion that stay in motion unless acted upon by an outside force, and actions that have equal and opposite reactions.

Hint:  the Higgs Boson is much more interesting.

A typical morning

Lily:  Don't read the comments.
Kana:  WHAT IS THIS EVEN
Shep:  You read the comments on instagram again, didn't you?

 Kana here.  The new apartment does not actually make anyone behave any better.  But it does make us seem marginally more civilized.  You can barely see it, but Shep has a mug of tea and giant cupcake for breakfast.  I have fruit, a danish, and coffee.  Lily probably ate something she hid in her lab.  It's really hard to actually pull her out of the lab.

A peaceful breakfast at the counter...

Meanwhile, Cauth and Nora are being super domestic.  Cauth might be the only one of us who can actually cook.  I know Shep and I can't really.  And Lily brews potions.  Which is not the same thing as cooking, no matter what she claims.  The cat is a stray that's been hanging around us for ages now.  I guess it's adopted us or something.

until someone steals the bacon...

And as usual, Sam and Nellie would like to pretend that the rest of us don't exist...at least in the mornings.  It does get a little hectic around here.

Samantha:  We are going to sit at the table like proper ladies...