Snow days force all kinds of creativity

By Staff
Michelle Blaylock, Mom's Corner
Aren't children imaginative? My kids are imaginative and their ideas can be cute, funny, sweet and just plain crazy. For example, last week my kids were all doing the "snow dance," except for my 14-year- old boy. He's decided it is just not acceptable for a 14-year-old boy to do a snow dance.
What is the snow dance, you ask? Well, it's singing "Snow, snow, snow, we want snow. It's gonna snow" in a beautiful little sing-song voice while doing any kind of dancing. In all fairness, I must give credit where credit is due. My kids didn't come up with this one all on their own. A wonderful teacher in Kentucky taught one of them to do this and from there it just grew. It's cute–two or three times. After about 100 times it's incredibly annoying! (I didn't think the teacher was quite so wonderful by the time my kids had done this about 200 times.)
This time the kids were disappointed in the outcome of their snow dancing. They insisted it was because not enough people here know about the snow dance. Therefore, it didn't have enough power to work. Um, yeah right.
Nevertheless, the kids have come up with quite a few other cute ideas. They discovered glue and paint mixed together can make a fairly good finger paint. They also found that if they smear this concoction all over the palm of their hands and wait for it to dry it looks really cool when you peel it off.
They found a red collar on a Dalmatian will make a pink and black Dalmatian. The rain helped on this one, but they kept it going by using water in a bucket when the pink started to fade. I put a stop to this one quickly. The kids insisted the dog liked it and after all they were helping to keep the dog clean. I didn't buy it, not to mention having a pink and black Dalmatian in the yard looked bizarre.
They read somewhere that if you put vinegar in a small soda bottle and fill a balloon with baking soda, then stretch the balloon over the top of the bottle and dump the baking soda in, that the balloon will fill with a gas. Unfortunately, they were not supposed to use water balloons. It turned out a bit messy due to that one little overlooked piece of information.
Of course, like all kids, boxes are a wonderful tool to fuel the imagination. In our house, boxes have been converted into Viking ships, cars, planes, jails (you don't want to know), tunnels, robots, houses, rockets, computers, TVs, puppet stages and, of course, somewhere to trap a sibling when a parent isn't looking. No, I'm not kidding. When we moved to Kentucky, my oldest girl got fed up with her little brother and told them they were going to play "jack-in-the-box." They had their dad to cut small holes in the box and they decorated the box. Next, she convinced her brother to be "Jack." When he got in the box and closed the top, she duct taped him in!
Some of their ideas have been just dangerous. They have used our lawn mower and a trailer for a wagon train. They've tried to sled behind the lawn mower. They tried to use boxes flattened out to slide down a flight of stairs. They used a 50-gallon barrel to roll down a hill. Unfortunately, they didn't think ahead, literally! There was a creek at the bottom of the hill. Good thing it was only about 10 inches deep.
By the way, do you know that if you drag someone behind your bicycle while they are sitting on a towel, the towel will get huge gapping holes in it? How about that?
On the whole, I'm glad my kids are imaginative and creative…I think anyway.
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