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.

It's all about 'where' though.

Our son is two & a half- high time for some big boy pants, I say.

We’ve been talking to him about the potty for months now. We bought the potty seat.  We read Everyone Poops & discussed at great length. We let him “flush the poopies” from his diaper.

And we were making some slow progress.  He really liked talking about the potty at least. But the Potty Sticker Chart remained pretty bare, with two lonely stickers.

Over the holidays my mother-in-law shared with us her tried-and-true method- let him run around with no pants for a week.  He’ll be so uncomfortable with the idea of going into mid-air, he’ll want to use the potty.

Sounded shocking. We already think of our kids as being a bit feral. But she potty trained four kids, & none of them wet their pants (as far as I know, anyway).  And it would be so nice to cut back to one diaper-clad babe-in-arms.  Not to mention reducing our carbon footprint.

Desperate measures are called for.  So today we decided to give it a whirl.

It’s January, so we cranked up the heat and put him in a sweater & fleece, with socks.  Quite an outfit, I tell you.  The view got pretty weird at times.  We trailed him all day long, repeating, “Need to go yet? How about now?”

Kinda shocked, but it worked like a crazy.  He used the potty 4 times (both numbers.)  There was one minor accident (involving the seat of an unfortunate toy car.)  But all in all, a really encouraging start.

Tonight we put the diaper back on before bed.  He is already impatient with the bulky things. By the time we pick up some toddler underwear hopefully he’ll be ready for them.

In the meantime, I just hope he doesn’t become too attached to life in the buck.

-m