Flowers in the bath

Geekling has only recently begun accepting baths again after about 8 months of being completely petrified of them (all the while loving his swimming lessons).  It's been a full turn around - today he asked for a bath in the afternoon just for fun.

To make it a bit more interesting, I grabbed some leaves and flowers from our herb and vegie patch to add to the bathwater - marigolds, tarragon flowers, carrot leaves and nasturtium leaves.  Geekling is well past the  stage of sticking everything in his mouth, but all of these are edible if he had chose to try them.

He had great fun counting them, naming colours, sticking the flowers in between his toes and then we discovered the nasturtium leaves stuck really well to wet skin...

Water Beads

After being inspired by Play At Home Mom, I purchased a heap of these cool water beads on ebay.  They are made of non-toxic polymer gel and start off a little smaller than mustard seeds but when immersed in water will swell to the size of large marbles.  They feel jelly like and last forever - if they start to shrink I just immerse them in some more water for a couple of hours.

Showing various stages of growth/absorption

Water bead sensory tub and sorting into ice mould 

Water beads in the bath - trying to 'catch' them with slotted spoons and a seive

On our recent trip to our local market I saw many stalls selling these water beads for a couple of dollars a packet (which makes about 1 cup of beads) - I bought ours for $2 for 10 packs including postage, and they're the same brand!

I am saving the packs of clear beads to do an upcoming experiment by colouring the water they grow in to see if they take on the colour.

Sponge bath toy

This idea came from one of the blogs I follow, but I can't recall (or find by Google) which one, so here is another link that details the how to as well.

I grabbed three new household sponges and sliced them up.  In hindsight, I would have sliced them up lengthways into thirds as the above link suggests.  I then cable tied them in the centre, which took a few attempts as the bundle was originally too fat.  Voila!  A nice bright spongy bath toy!

I am also thinking of some fabulous messy outdoor painting we could do with these when the weather warms up.

Edit: I found these on another couple of blogs since this post: Here