Hydroponic sweatshirts...

Have I mentioned that Isaac's an artist? Okay, just kidding. He and Justin put their creativity skills to the max in their Christmas creations for their small group boys. They screen-printed cannons onto sweatshirts for all of them, and I must say Alexandra and I were very impressed. I'm not sure if we've told you guys about the infamous cannon, but let's just say it's brought deeper joys to that small group than anything else. One of the projects a while back together was to build an air cannon out of pvc pipe and they've since spent their time seeing how far they can launch whatever things they find into whatever things will create the biggest boom. So fun. So their gift to Ryan, Chris, and Tim were custom-designed sweatshirts, which they all loved and will, from here on out, simultaneously wear anytime they are together. How cute.

Isaac's also experimenting with growing plants hydroponically. He read a lot about it and discovered that plants don't actually need soil to grow in; soil is just the medium for getting the plant the nutrients it needs to survive. But if you can get the nutrients to the plant in another way, the you can grow things without the soil. So he built a planter set up to continuously drop water down the tube, sprouted some wheat grass, 'planted' the seeds without any soil in the tube, and let it grow for a week to see what happened. And it flourished! Technically, the way we did it will only work for wheat grass because it grows so quickly that it can get really big even if it isn't getting any nutrients outside of the water. I think when we try to grow another more complex plant hydroponically, we'd have to find a way to get it more nutrients, but the wheat grass was a fun experiment. Then we juiced it and drank it, and it tasted so much sweeter than any commercial wheat grass I've had.