News Taffy

This week was an extra fun one because my husband and I got to celebrate our anniversary with Tandoori, the Indian cuisine restaurant in town, and an evening alone. Side note: If you haven't tried Tandoori yet, you must! I'm all about supporting local business anyway, but especially unique kinds for our area. So getting ready to leave last night for a second night out, thanks to friends that let us also get out on the actual anniversary date, I needed to side track London while I cleaned up the kitchen.

Have you ever wondered what would happen to a bar of soap if you microwaved it? I'm sure you're thinking, "absolutely not," but believe me, it's amazing. I saw the idea on several different blogs and kid science websites, and the child inside of me could not wait to try it. We laid it on a large plastic plate and set the microwave for two minutes on high. After about 30 seconds, we began to see changes, and it continued for the full two minutes. It will grow and grow, and finally, it'll look like a huge puffy cloud. London stood on a chair looking into the microwave amazed for two full minutes (and I got to load the dishwasher without "help!") The only reason I haven't tried this experiment before yesterday is because I wasn't a huge fan of using a bar of soap just for an experiment and nothing else practical after that. However, I recently came across a blog that used the soap cloud to make bath puffy paint! So we took a small amount of the cloud, pureed it with boiling water, and added food coloring. (I put the rest of the cloud in a ziploc bag to use for more paint later.)

My favorite part of this craft was that London got to put the soap on the plate, push the buttons on the microwave, push the button on the processor, and put in the food coloring. She really felt like she made her own bath paint, and crafts like that are important. We poured it into a plastic container, stuck in a couple sponge paint brushes, and off to the bath tub she went. I'm not even kidding, I sat there while she sang and painted the bathtub walls until she was shivering and wrinkly, and I still had to coax her out of the tub! It makes a lot of paint, so I'm glad I saved the rest of the cloud.

She'd already had her bath, obviously, when our friends were sitting for us last night, but I will definitely be making this the next time someone babysits long enough to need to bathe them and send them on to bed. You couldn't make bath time any easier!

Until next time,
Heather