Messy Party!

For the official friend party (the ones that only happen on even birthdays) Sada and Mom came up with a half-dozen activities that normally don't get done in one week, let alone one day.

We started out with giving everyone white t-shirts so they wouldn't get their regular clothes stained with all the pain and food coloring that was sure to be plashed around. Then they sat down on the front sidewalk to build sculptures out of packing peanuts and water - yes, it's possible, if you have popcorn packing peanuts that dissolve into mush when they get soaked. But if you barely dip the ends in water, they stick to each other and make amazing animals, barns, corrals, skyscrapers, robots, you name it. After most of the girls arrived, we headed to the back to mix together plaster bug fossils - or at least put the plastic bugs in the creamy cement they made and set them aside to dry.

Next they got to paint with shaving cream on black plastic... then added tempera paint on top and swirled it in. Putting card stock on top of that makes beautiful rainbow stationary once the whipped peaks are wiped off. We hosed down the table and got out colored bubble mixtures and straws so they could blow bubbles in the containers and touch thin paper to the spheres, popping them and making designs on more papers to take home.

The next experiment was silly putty/goo with glue and borax - they made up three different colors in three teams then divided them all so everyone was able to take home some of each color. The stuff is really fun to play with, and slightly mind-boggling because two liquids mix together to make a very bouncy solid - mad science strikes again.

We kept going with the paint theme and painted water color paint onto regular paper and sprinkled salt lightly over the painting. Try it - the texture's amazing. By then, most of the fossils were dry, so we extracted the bugs and got out the brown paint, watered it down, and dipped paper towels in it to antique the dragonfly, grasshopper, spider, and fly imprints they'd made. They turned out AMAZING! They sat over by the side to dry and we got out the cupcake makings.

Gel food coloring does a marvelous job of turning play dough into really cool colors and with essential oils added the cupcake makers made incredible masterpieces. They each stuck a candle on top and sang Happy Birthday so Sada could blow them all out and made her wish (still a secret). This "claydough" recipe dries into sculptures really well without cracking. We may have these cupcakes around for years to come if they don't get squished before they're dry. They each had extra, too, so the girls took home their own cupcakes plus a few balls to make more creatures later.

It must have been a great 2 hours, because after it was all cleaned up, Sada declared it an enormous success!