THE NANA FILES (aka: Summer Fun: July Edition – Part 2)

After Papa Jack’s birthday celebration on Monday, some storms rolled into our area (see the first post Summer Fun: July Edition by clicking here).

We woke up Tuesday morning to more storms with no chance of them clearing any time soon.  Swimming was obviously out of the question for the day, soooo, I had to pull out THE NANA FILES (aka: Pinterest ideas) to keep the kids busy and occupied.

After a little breakfast and a few cartoon shows, I completed setting up for the first activity.  I had purchased some little packages to “Grow Your Own Crystals.”  Each grandchild stirred the granules in the warm water (with a little help from Nana) and then poured them over the stones we placed in the little container.

Jade went first and chose the pink crystals.

Next it was Kylee’s turn.  She chose purple.

Last, but certainly not least, Jackson mixed up his green granules.

This is what they looked like after we completed all the directions.

Jade’s

Kylee’s

Jackson’s

Now on to the next activity.

Did you know that baking soda and vinegar are interesting ingredients to play with?  When you put vinegar in baking soda, it results in a bubbling reaction.  Kids love to watch it bubble!  Add in a variety of food coloring and you can make designs and pictures.

I mixed up small cups of vinegar with food coloring.  Each grandchild had four cups with colored vinegar (red, blue, green, and yellow) and an eye dropper.  I also gave them a cup with water to “rinse out” their eye dropper.  I used tin foil cake pans (the cheapest ones worked just fine and clean-up was a snap: just throw them away!) and filled the bottom with baking soda about an inch deep.

Once I showed them how to drop the colored vinegar solution in the baking soda, they got really creative.  Needless to say, they were occupied for quite some time — almost TWO HOURS!  I had purchased the largest box of cheap baking soda I could find (it almost looked like a cereal box it was so big!), so when the kids covered up all their baking soda with colored vinegar, I just poured on more baking soda and they started designing again.  It was fun to watch them play with it.

Running out of places to “color.”

It’s getting a little “soup-y.”

I’d say they had fun playing around with this!

After lunch I invoked the rainy day Nana option:  TAKE THE GRANDKIDS TO THE MOVIES!  We went to the theater in our small town and saw Turbo.  It was a cute movie about a snail who wants to go fast and race.  It kind of had a moral to the story:  You CAN do anything you want if you just work hard and put your mind to it.

“What was the best part of the movie?” you ask.  I’ll tell you:  THE POPCORN WAS FREE!  Yes, I said FREE!  At our local theater, if you bring your own bowl to the movie on Mondays or Tuesdays, you get popcorn free.  🙂

All in all, the stormy, rainy day turned out pretty fun!