Liquid Fun in a Jar

I’m going to date myself here- when I was a kid, we rented a Betamax machine for my birthday party & watched ‘Splash’.  My parents were extreme late adopters.  We were probably the last family in Michigan to get a cordless phone or a microwave.  To me, that Betamax was like having a magical movie-robot in our house.

Fast forward to today: I find it a little odd that my 2 year old can play YouTube Muppet videos on the iPad all by himself.  Or that my 1 year old taps at my laptop screen impatiently, wondering why it doesn’t react like an iPhone.  So I admit I got a big Luddite-grin on my face when my son recently called “Mixing Colors” his favorite game.

This is such a simple project but so far it’s given my son hours & hours of technology-free fun.  Here’s the gist:

We’ve been trying to teach our son the concept of color mixing for weeks with very little success.  After one round of this game, he got it: when you mix colors, they make a new color.  Add more water & the colors get lighter.  Mix them all, you get brown.  And man, the excitement!  It was like the boy invented secondary colors.

Making forts out of couch cushions, avoiding the cracks in the sidewalk.. Good to know the oldies are still goodies.

-m

Looking for a fun book to teach toddlers about color mixing?  Mouse Paint rules.

Springtime Pals

Since I was a girl, I’ve loved dandelions.  Bright splashes of color across a field- what’s not to like?

Dandelions provided hours of fun for me as a kid.  They were magic wands & floating boats. You could weave them into a crown of flowers, decorate the spokes of your bike wheels, or turn a puddle into flower soup.  Then all of a sudden the dandelions turned into fuzzy puff balls that you could send flying through the air with a breath.

And remember, “Mama had a baby & her head popped off!”- then you’d use your thumb to pop off the flower?  OK, that sounds kind of sadistic now that I’m old enough to notice.  But at the time, decapitating dandelions was about as cool as it got.

I understand not everyone shares my love of the humble dandelion.  Some call it a pernicious weed.  A pox on a manicured lawn.  To each his own.  But before you bust out the weed killer, consider this: in the early spring, when other flowers are scarce, dandelions provide crucial nutrients to bees.  And bees could use a little help.

Over the past 50 years, wild & domesticated bee populations have been cut in half due to invasive mites & pesticides.  Bees don’t just make delicious honey.  They are the unsung helper to the American farmer.  Many fruit, nut, vegetable, legume, & seed crops depend on bee pollination.

So I say we (re)learn to enjoy the spritely yellow dandelion & give our worker bees something to snack on till summer.

Long live the dandelion & the bee!

-m

Read more at Suite101: The Honey Bee Crisis: Decline in Honey Bee Population Worries Farmers