Pinterest

Pinterest: {noun} :an online pinboard used to organize and share the things you love

                          : a place to put the things you wish you could have/do/create but know you
                            will never find the time/money/energy to do

                          : a complete time sucking black hole

I am sure you have all heard of Pinterest.  If not, check it out here.  I'll wait...

Well, that sure took you awhile.  I was afraid that I was going to have to send out a search party.

You got sucked in you say?  You kept finding things that you could do with the house, if only you had a house with 6000 square feet and 18 foot ceilings and an impossibly large kitchen, but you pinned the ideas because it's for your "next house".  And by then you had been looking around for so long you found you were hungry.   But you weren't sure what you were hungry for so you searched in the food Boards.  Now you were hungry and had a million ideas for snacks but couldn't bring yourself to get off the computer and down into the kitchen to actually make one of them.  You kept saying you would just pin "one more".  But that "one more" didn't really fit into any of the board categories you already had so you had to create another one.  Which started off a whole board reorganization.  

Yep, you've been Pinterested.

It is so popular that it has officially received verb status.  As in, "Mom, Pinterest something fun for me to do."

Even my four year old is obsessed with the site.  She asks me to Pinterest something every day.  I might have a problem.  But I am not willing to give it up just yet so no interventions.  Plus, we are all learning a lot of fun things:  

• Interior Decorating:  I got great ideas for the Creative Corner and Playroom
• Personal Grooming:  MadHatters hairstyle came from pictures and I got the how-to on hair cutting there too
• Cooking:  Oh, the number of recipes I have pulled off of this site!  And actually cooked.  Everyone in the house is very happy that Pinterest exists for this alone.
• Crafting:  Our bunny noses project, Lava Lamps and Milk Painting.

And in writing this, I realized that I have not posted pictures of either of the last two projects.  Because, as the saying goes, "Did the Pinterest really happen if it hasn't been blogged about?"  Ok, that isn't a real saying but it should be.  Everything on Pinterest is blog linked!

So, let me remedy my oversight.  I give you the Lava project {done all the way back in February - MadHatter still has her long hair}.

 A very simple project with very few ingredients, most of which I had at home already.  I had two open mouth clear jars left over from something, vegetable oil and the food coloring.  I just had to run out an find out what they called Alka Seltzer in Chile.  It turns out you can just call it Alka Seltzer and they will hand you a box of yastá.

And this is so simple to put together even Stinkerbell could help.  We filled the jars to a bit over their halfway point (maybe 2/3) with oil and then to just about an 2 inches below their tops with water.  You can see the split of oil and water in MadHatter's jar below...

We added some drops of food coloring.  Only one color at a time so that we could focus on what happened and not on the colors mixing (not yet anyway).

  And the we dropped in a quarter or half tablet of Alka Seltzer {Don't use too much Alka Seltzer at one time.  It will make your mixture cloudy.  Which will happen after awhile anyway but we did this 4 times and it was still pretty clear} and waited to see what would happen...

They were instantly enthralled.  And wanted to do it again, and again, and again.  So we did.

 And then we mixed it up and added another color to see what would happen.  MadHatter chose to add yellow to her red while Stinkerbell added yellow to her blue.  MadHatter loved watching the colors mix as they bubbled and her jar slowly turned orange.  Stinkerbell's was a lot more noticeable as it turned purple and she couldn't stop watching it - from all angles.  I stopped taking pictures and wish I hadn't as their faces were priceless!

And then there was our project from last week.  We played with milk.  Which had both girls a bit confused as I have always told them to keep their fingers out of their milk.

This was even easier than the last set up as everything was right at my fingertips in the kitchen.  All you need is milk, food coloring, dish washing liquid, a toothpick (or two) and something to hold the milk that has a flat bottom.

Fill the container (I used 9" round cake pans) with about 1/2" of milk.  Then drop in the food coloring. This was just a drop here, 2 drops there.  Just make sure you leave white space and don't over do it with colors...

Take your toothpick and coat one end of it in dish washing liquid.  We put some in a small dish and covered the toothpick pretty well since the dish soap is what makes the whole thing work.  I then gave them each a toothpick and told them to dip it right next to the food coloring dot. 

It's amazing what happens...the color is repelled by the dish soap and moves away from it - quickly and in dizzying swirls.  Once the girls figured this out there was no stopping them.  We dipped it next to, into and through each dot, white space until we had a complete mess...

 

 The swirling and twirling cannot be captured on film {digital} but it was pretty cool to watch. And we spent pretty close to an hour playing.  I was short a liter of milk and a lot of food coloring by the time we were done, but I had gained two pretty smiley little girls that had a new found appreciation for soap and milk.

So, back to Pinterest.  It does suck more of my time than I would ever admit to but usually at night while the girls are in bed and B is out of town.  But I also credit it with making me a much more creative, interesting and fun mom.  For that, it is time well spent!