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.

They've got to see this.

Forget the shoebox full of pictures. Digital scrapbooking will set you free.

When I was pregnant I pictured myself creating beautiful, elaborate scrapbooks chronicling every precious moment of my kids’ childhoods.  But as it turns out, I’m not much of a scrapbooker.  Maybe it’s all the years spent living in apartments.  Clutter just isn’t a great option when space is at a premium.  Or maybe I’m just lazy & enjoy getting 4 hours of sleep instead of 3.  So our answer is digital scrapbooking.

When our kids were born, we created an email account for each of them.  We email them on special occasions, or whenever we feel like sending them a little message.  Birthdays, we send a happy birthday message & attach a jpeg of their invitation.  When we send baby photos to family members (almost daily, I admit) we CC our kids. First steps, video clips of dance parties, Halloween costumes.  Or most often, we’ll just send an impromptu love note.

We also gave their email addresses to our family and close friends so that they can say hi when the mood strikes.

Every so often, we’ll check their email accounts.  It’s already so much fun to read about all the little moments we’ve had with our kids over the past two years.  It’s sort of like a photo album meets journal meets scrapbook.  I love to picture our son, 10 years from now, reading a note from his uncle on his 2nd birthday. Or our daughter watching a video of her first birthday cake.

…But enjoy checking that email while you can- I fully expect to be banished in a few years.

-m