Home made play #1 : Frozen hands

I like making play stuff for JED. It's how I play with them and I enjoy nothing more than to be able to do this. Perhaps, it's got to do with the memories of my own childhood where my mom would always come up with simple and fun ways for me to play. It could have been filling a plastic bag full of water and poking holes in it. Or it could have been bringing home bags of sand from the beach and building a sandbox for me to play in.

So, from the point that they were cognizant enough to muck around, I started making things that they could muck about with. Most of the time, there wasn't much intent in it except to watch them have fun. And among other things, this blog seems to be a record of many of those times.

Anyway, I haven't done it in a while and JED seem to be growing up so quickly so I thought I'd do a series of home made play starting with their individual and recent favourites.

As with most girls her age, Jordan loves Frozen. Thankfully we are seeing the tail end of it. Even then she is fascinated with all things ice and blue.

So during a particularly hot spate, which we have been having quite a bit of, I decided to make her a couple of ice hands to play with.

All that was necessary
1. A few latex gloves
2. Some water to fill up the gloves (if you want to be adventurous, it could be coloured water)
3. For fun, drop beads and what nots into it so that the kids get an extra kick out of it.
4. Salt, warm water, cold water (and other variables of melting agents).
5. Syringes, teaspoons and little pipettes to dribble water onto the ice hands.
6. A freezer to dump them in for a couple of hours (Lay them on flat surfaces with fingers spread out so that they freeze properly)

The challenge was to strip the glove without breaking the fingers. We weren't too successful with that so Elsa came away with many broken fingers. It seemed to bring out the macabre in JED; they insisted on breaking more fingers.

They figured out that with the salt, the fingers and hands melted quicker but not as quick warm water did and so on and so forth.

By the end of it, all of JED had fingers that were frozen blue, especially Jordan who has as much cold tolerance as an insect. But they wanted to play with more ice hands. So I have an emergency stash of ice hands in my freezer for days that they are upset or have fallen down or are running a fever and need so chill respite.

But woe is he who opens my freezer and is met by a shelf of frozen hands. A friend did and asked "Who froze Elsa?"