Day: 16 April 2016

Clever Ideas

Me - chuffed with myself!
Me – chuffed with myself!

Sometimes you read about a kid who has invented something useful and you wonder just how on earth they ever came up with such a clever idea that nobody had thought of before. Or maybe they came up with a better way of doing something that had already been done.

A few weeks ago I invented something that was useful and I realised that it is not actually as hard as one would think.

Those pesky ants kept getting into our cat’s bowl.  The poor cat did not fancy eating his pellets when they had wriggly little pepper tasting insects on them. (Ants do taste like pepper you know – pepper gets its flavour from a mild acid and ants produce acid – but I don’t recommend eating one to find out.)

We had to recycle pellets to the birds every single day. Worse – because he has a kidney problem – the pellets that he chomps are rather expensive.

Mum was all for just spraying poison on the walls so that the ants can’t even get to his dish but I thought that was a bit mean.

So I started thinking…

Ants don’t like water.  Well – they like it to drink but they don’t really like swimming in it. Right!

I took a dish and put some water in it and put the cats bowl on top of it.

Turned out the dish was a bit small and the ants made a little bridge of themselves and still got into the food.

So I took a bigger dish.  This did not work so well either because that cat of ours is a messy creature and he knocked half his pellets into the water. They swelled up and also got wasted. Even the birds did not like those squishy suckers.

Eventually I found a dish that was just the right size and ever since then we have hardly squandered a single pellet.

There was a process that I followed.

First I thought about the problem. Then I evaluated the situation to see how I could fix it. Then I tried different solutions to see which worked best.

I felt very chuffed because I had fixed the ant problem.  And it wasn’t even really hard either.

I discovered that they do sell cats bowls with a little moat around it for water – but still – I made a plan and it worked.

Be inventive!

Sibo

Sleepy Head

Sibo on her bed 2

You all know how I like to read… well sometimes mum is really irritating when she interrupts me in the middle of a good story and says it’s time for bed. I beg for another half hour but she says that kids need to sleep for at least 10 or 11 hours a night to be happy and healthy. She reckons I get grumpy when I don’t have enough sleep.

Sometimes I cheat and read with a torch under my blankets. The other day Mum caught me out and I was in serious trouble – she took my book away for two whole days!

I was quite sure that Mum was fibbing about how much sleep in needed so decided to google and find out why exactly why so many hours are needed.

Firstly between the age of 7 and 12 years old, we really do need to sleep those 10 or 11 hours a night. This is not just to stop us from becoming cranky either. It’s the time when our muscles repair themselves during the night. And don’t just think arm and leg muscles – it also includes our heart muscle.

Sleep also controls the signals that tell us when we are hungry or when we are full up – which allows us to maintain a good weight.

While we are happily snoozing our brains stores up all the stuff we have learned during the day – so that we can recall it later when we need it.

If we don’t sleep properly at night, it is harder to pay attention at school during the day. We tend to make more mistakes if we are tired than if we are well rested.

If we don’t get enough sleep at night – we could always have a little nap during the day to make up the sleep time. Preferably not during school time though because we’d land up in trouble with the teacher.

Apparently – it should take us about 15 to 20 minutes to fall asleep from when our head hits the pillow.

Of course teenagers can get away with a little less sleep – like 8 to 9 hours a night. Half the time they don’t get anywhere near this amount of sleep and so they really do need to sleep in over the weekends.

Seems like the older you get the less sleep you need.

Sleep tight and sweet dreams.

Sibo