soap

Sorry if I just got that song stuck in your head!  (But it’s been stuck in mine all afternoon, and my mother always taught me to share…)

So. One bottle of shaving cream (the foaming kind) + two cookie sheets + a handful of plastic frogs and lizards = some messy clean fun!

Anna at first said, “I don’t like this squishy!” but after a bit of encouragement got into it.  Unfortunately, despite repeated reminders that it was shaving cream and not whipped cream, she eventually succumbed to the temptation to taste it.  Raspberry scented shaving cream apparently tastes rather disappointing when you’re expecting whipped cream!

Carolyn, on the other hand, loved the experience and spent the entire hour I was prepping dinner squishing, molding, tracing, poking and patting the stuff.  At one point I looked over and she had re-created the leaning tower of Pisa.  She also made a volcano, and then a lake (for the frogs and lizards) and I think she was trying to make a raceway when I finally had to clear everything off the table for dinner.

So, shaving cream free play was (mostly) a hit here.  I seriously doubt Anna will try to eat it again, and it was so ridiculously easy to clean up I’d be happy to let them play with it another time!

I don’t, as a rule, buy bubble bath for the kids.  As fun as it looks, in the Dora, Princess and My Little Pony flavors it comes in, it just dries out their skin and makes them itchy.

So today, we made our own!  I came across this recipe, and believe it or not, we already had all of these things in the house.  (Yes, including glycerin.  I bought it to reactivate some Wilton colors but never used it.)  I cut it in half because we only had 3 6oz travel bottles on hand to store the finished product in.

We had three essential oils: lavender, peppermint and eucalyptus.  We made one of each, and the girls seemed to prefer the peppermint.  The eucalyptus was a hard sell, but I told them we’d save it for cold season.

There was a bit leftover in our mixing bowl, so we added a couple more drops of peppermint and ran it with some warm water into a bigger bin so the kids could have a “hand bubble bath”.  (I had an ulterior motive – Carolyn’s piano lesson is this afternoon and she had purple playdough stuck under her fingernails from earlier.)

Note that it doesn’t appear to be particularly bubbly, but the kids really like how it smells, so I think they’ll have fun putting it in their bath anyway!

This summer is flying right by!  Our theme this week is “Good, Clean Fun.”  I have some fun projects in mind that will likely be more messy than clean, but they’ll certainly be fun!  Today’s project is a science experiment suggested by my friend Jenny: microwaving soap.

First order of business was to buy soap.  (Yes, we do bathe & shower here, but long ago switched to liquid bath soap (less soap scum to clean out of the showers) so there are no bars of soap in the house!)  The recommendation was to use brand-name Ivory to make this work.  (For more about the reason this works, I liked this site.)

Next step: cut the soap in half and place on a paper plate.

We put the soap in the (rather dirty) microwave for 2 minutes.  It was clearly done expanding by 1:15, so we stopped it and checked it out.  Anna disappeared in terror – it apparently smelled unpleasant to her, plus it’s a texture and shape that doesn’t really appear naturally…

But Carolyn thought it was fabulous.  I had to ask her to stop using pieces of it to wash her hands!  (I bet there was a blip in our water usage this afternoon!)  So now we have a plate of foamy, crazy soap in our bathroom.  And 2.5 bars of Ivory soap to find other ways to use.

And my microwave (after a little extra elbow grease on my part) is now spotless.

While I was performing science experiments in the kitchen, I whipped up some of the “ultimate” glass cleaner from here.  I have to say, it did an impressive job on the family room window, which the dogs love to cover with nose prints.  I think I’d have to agree that it’s the ultimate homemade class cleaner!