DIY Fun: Giant Ice Cube Awesomeness

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My friend Andrea finds the coolest ideas/clothes/articles about kids and always so thoughtfully passes them my way. One day, if she chooses to be so, she is going to be the bees knees of all moms. On Wednesday afternoon, she sent me this link, and you’d better believe that 10 minutes after all three boys were in bed for a rare nap, I was neither folding laundry, doing dishes, preparing a healthy meal, nor cleaning the bathrooms that so needed my attention. Nope. I was making this. A gigantic ice cube with green and blue food coloring, filled with mini plastic dinosaurs, sea creatures, and farm animals.

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I started with a large plastic container and filled it a third of the way with blue-colored water and sea creatures. My reasoning was this: I would let this layer freeze, then add a green layer with farm animals, let that freeze, and then add a clear layer with dinos. It had to do with some internal desire to teach about ecosystems or layers of the earth’s crust, mantle, core, etc. But I didn’t allow enough time for each layer to set. So it ended up kind of jumbled up together in a blueish-green animal ice cube. But the good news is, it still turned out fantastic and only took about 12 hours to freeze all the way through!

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The timing of this project was impeccable. With Milo out of school for two days, I needed to find something a little more structured to occupy these guys. Plus, it was nearly 80 degrees out. Perfect ice/bathing suit weather.

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Getting to work

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The only rules were: 1. You may hit the ice or the tools with the wooden hammer, but please be careful of your brother’s fingers, and 2. Please do not drink the food-colored water, as it has yucky chemicals (right?).

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Learning to use a chisel

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Consulting each other about what to do next…

Decision made. Water:DSC_0127DSC_0130DSC_0146

And more water:DSC_0152DSC_0153

It was awesome. This activity occupied Milo and Oliver for a good hour, then they played and swam in the green water for another 30 minutes before quitting for a lunch break. Thanks, Andrea, for finding this, and Jennifer for the great idea!

Hope you guys have a great weekend. Ours got off to a rocky start when Andrew was up all night on Thursday with some kind of stomach thing… I may have dodged that bullet- we’ll have to wait and see. But in the meantime, we have Washington University’s Annual Thurteen Festival today! So, if a stomach virus doesn’t make us puke, the carnival rides surely will!

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