rainbow water

Just a quick little post from me tonight!  The Hooligans aren’t here this week –  it’s March Break.  I’m sure most of you know that the Hooligans are the kiddos in my home daycare, but what I haven’t mentioned before is that all of the Hooligans have Moms and/or Dads who are school teachers.  This means that when Christmas break, March break and Summer break roll around, the Hooligans stay home with their Mom and/or Dad,  and I’m on holiday too, with my boys!  It’s a beautiful thing!

Anyway, because the Hooligans haven’t been here this week, I’ve had a little blogging break.  My brain never truly stops thinking of crafty/creative ideas though, even when I’m on holiday, so the other night, I thought it would be fun to prepare some coloured ice cubes so my boys could have rainbow water to drink on St. Patrick’s day.   I grabbed the Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, and Violet (otherwise known as purple) and I mixed up a batch of rainbow ice-cubes.

Ok, so you may have noticed that ROYGBV = six letters and my ice-cube trays have 7 sections in each row.  I mixed some blue and purple gels together to make an extra colour that we’ll call Indigo, so I could fill the tray.

I popped the tray in the freezer, and fast-forward to today.  Happy St. Patrick’s Day!  March 17th is always extra special at our house because in addition to celebrating all things green and Irish, we’re also celebrating my hubby’s birthday! 

We had an awesome day celebrating!  We headed out of town and to a near-by city for an afternoon of laser-bowling.  They turn out the lights, and you bowl with glow in the dark pins, disco balls, neon lights, music playing etc.  It was a first for us.  We’ve bowled before, but never in the dark, and we all bowl fairly horribly, which made it even more fun.  It was a great afternoon.   Then we went out for dinner, and came back home for cake.  In all honestly, I’d completely forgotten about the rainbow cubes, and I didn’t remember them until I went into the freezer to get out some ice cream to serve with the cake!  

Woohoo!!  Isn’t it great how sometimes the simplest things make the biggest impressions?  Everyone thought this was the COOLEST water EVER.   Doesn’t it look awesome?  Whip some up!  Your kids will think you’re THE BEST!

My advice?  Don’t wait until next St. Patrick’s Day to try this.  Surprise your kiddo with a glass of rainbows on a dull or gloomy day “just because”.  It really doesn’t get much easier than this.  Go on!  Brighten their day!!

coloured ice in the snow

One night a few weeks ago I added some food colouring and beads and ornaments to a few ice cube trays, and popped them into the freezer so we’d have them to play with on a snowy day.

The temps turned really mild, and the only precipitation that we got for a couple of weeks came in the form of rain, so it was a while before we got to use our colourful cubes.  We finally got a decent amount of snow last weekend, and made the most of it because it wasn’t expected to last for long. 

We spent one morning tobogganing on our neighbour’s hill,

and the next morning (we’d received another couple of inches overnight), I set some of the cubes outside with some spoons and containers, and sent the Hooligans out to investigate.  

Just look at the fun they had…

What a simple way to have some colourful fun on a winter day!

plastic icicles

There are so many Christmas craft ideas floating around out there in our little corner of the blog-o-sphere right now!!  As Christmas creeps closer, it gets harder and harder to decide what to make, and what to leave for next year.  I want to make ‘em all!!

In hind-sight, I could have left these until after Christmas, when we’ll still be making “winter crafts” without the “holiday” focus.  I kinda fell in love with these though, when I saw them over at Adventures at Home.  I actually thought they were REAL icicles at first glance. Anyway, I was too excited to wait until after Christmas to make some!

The weather today was absolutely incredible for this time of year!  By 10:30am, the thermometer on our deck read 10 degrees!!  The kids were bundled up because they’re in the habit of wearing all their winter gear, but I became too warm with my coat on, and was actually walking around like THIS when we were crafting:

this was taken in the reflection of my sliding glass door

Ok, on to the icicles.   For the prep: Use an exacto-knife to cut irregular, jaggedy shapes out of a plastic dish detergent bottle.  For a couple of the icicles, I used a plastic package that held raspberries.  Add a couple of tbsp of white sugar to a jar (which you have a lid for).  Punch a hole in the top of each icicle.  Now you’re ready to roll.

Paint the icicles with some glue.  I used clear glue because, HELLO, see the price tag? TWENTY-NINE CENTS! I picked up 8 bottles of this stuff at Michael’s the other day.  They were marked down for clearance!!  

You don’t have to completely cover the icicle with glue.  Just a bit here and there is fine.  

Now pop your icicle in to the jar (the mason jar and its 2-piece lid was an exercise itself),   tighten the lid and……. shakey-shakey-shake it, shake it all you can…  (that’s the song that the Hooligans and I always sing when we have to shake anything.  It might be a song that I made up, so don’t feel bad if you don’t know the tune).

And that’s all there is to it.  Thread some ribbon or string through the hole, and you’re ready to hang it on your tree.  These might be better suited to hanging outside because of the sugar factor (said the glitter-phobe).

I love ‘em!  Thanks, Adventures at Home!

ice play on a hot fall day

We are in the midst of a Fall Heat-Wave here.  It’s incredible!  It’s hot!  It’s sticky!  And I’m loving it!  It was 27 degrees here this afternoon!!!  TWENTY-SEVEN DEGREES on the 26th of September!  Unreal!  What’s also kinda strange is that our leaves are just starting turn. Some years, we start seeing tinges of orange in late August, but this year, here we are, almost to October, and we’re just starting to see bits of colour here and there.

I’m not sure what it’s all about, but I’m not complaining.  I am so not ready to bid farewell to our warm, sunny days.  The longer winter stays at bay, the better, in my opinion.

Someone was complaining today though!  This morning, while playing in the yard, Miss Mess asked if we could go INSIDE, because it was “too hot” to play outside!

Fortunately, on the weekend, I ran across this post at Mommy Savers, suggesting coloured ice cubes for bath-time fun.  I didn’t realize today would be as hot as it was, and I didn’t have bath-fun in mind.  I just thought the brilliantly candied-coloured cubes looked awesome, and figured the Hooligans would have fun playing with them in a big bowl of water.  So I put Andrew to work, and had him whip up a couple of batches of them.

It was a fun little exercise in colour mixing for him.  He’s done colour mixing dozens of times, but it never gets old.

I’m so glad I had these in the freezer this morning, because as soon as my little friend complained about the heat this morning, ta-daaa…  Instant chill!  And FUN?  Oh my goodness!  They LOVED it!  We dumped the cubes into a big glass bowl of water, and added tongs, slotted spoons, and small containers.  Our first tray of cubes melted fairly quickly, because the water wasn’t terribly cold.  We dumped the second tray in, along with a tray of normal ice cubes.  These cubes lasted much longer, because the water temp had dropped significantly after the addition of 3 trays of ice.

This probably occupied the Hooligans for about 40 minutes.  When the cubes were gone, they were happy to play in the water with the containers and ice-trays.

What a cool and refreshing activity for a warm day!  We will definitely do this again.  It takes no time to mix up a couple of trays of these, and have them in the freezer for an easy but super-fun activity.  I think they’d be awesome in the tub too!  I wish I’d thought of this when my own boys were younger!

painting with coloured ice

Check it out!!  We painted with coloured ice today!  I saw lots of posts about this over the the summer, and now I know why it was such a popular activity!  You have to try it.  It’s so awesome!I

The ages of the kids here today ranged from 1 to 5, and they all loved doing this.  The colours are vibrant, the “paint” slides across the page beautifully, and the results are really pretty!  They look like watercolour paintings.

This is super-easy to prepare.  I used what I’m assuming is an egg holder (or possibly an egg mold), to make my coloured ice, but you can use ice cube trays, paper cups, popsicle molds etc.  You can even paint with real popsicles, but I’m thinking the sticky-factor might be a  bit of a put-off, especially if you’re planning on keeping your little one’s art-work.  Not to mention pricey (and wasteful).

So here’s what we did:

I found the lovely pink egg holder at a thrift shop a couple of weeks ago.  It looks like the yellow one that we take camping, except this one has holes on top, so maybe it is actually an egg mold of some sort.  Regardless, when I saw those holes in the top, I knew exactly what I’d be using this baby for.

I filled the “eggs” to the halfway point, and then added some food colouring (I used the gel kind for cake decorating, which made for beautifully vibrant ice-eggs), snapped the case shut, and finished filling the eggs through the hole on top.  There was a bit of leaking, as the case didn’t shut quite right, but I secured the two halves together with the caps of a couple of pens (I know, Einstein or what?).

I dropped the popsicle sticks through the holes, and placed the case in the freezer (and totally forgot about it until today).

I popped the whole thing into a bucket of warmish water for a couple of seconds so the ice-eggs would come out easily. I couldn’t belive THE COLOURS when I opened it up.  Hello, my pretties!

One of the Hooligans’ Gramma’s brings us loads of thin white cardboard (a little thicker than Bristol Board) so that’s what we used as our canvases.   You could paint on anything really, but I suspect regular paper would get a fairly soggy if your ice was melting quickly (which ours was today, as it was a super hot afternoon).

Isn’t it pretty?  I was so excited!  This was way better than I ever imagined it would be!  The colours were gorgeous.  My advice would be to quit while you’re ahead though, because some of the paintings became really wet with all the melting, and the colours kind of blurred together, which was pretty, but not quite as interesting as the lines and squiggles that were so clear at the beginning.

This actually used up very little of the ice-eggs, so I popped them all back in the case and put them back in the freezer.  We’ll be able to do this several more times, before they run out.  Ok, seriously?  I can’t WAIT to do this again tomorrow!

Big hit!  So easy, so beautiful!  Give it a try, and let us know how it works out for you!Want to see some other nifty things we’ve done with ice?  Check here, here and here!