Cheap dates and copycats

Today we took a page out of my (virtual) friend Jill's book and made a xylophone/science experiment.

Let us never mind that Jill could pull together six equal-sized glasses, none of which sported logos.  We are simply not that level of classy over here.  But we did gather six glasses and pour a different amount of water into each.  We first showed the girls how each glass sounded different when you (lightly!) tapped it. 

Then we added food coloring to each to make these colorful glasses that we could "play" by singing out colors for notes.

Somehow it was way more exciting for the girls to reach OVER their sister to tap the glasses furthest out of their reach.

 

And eventually, instead of singing colors, they started making up songs with words.  At this point, Clara was singing about "a dog and a CAAAAAT!"

When we'd had enough of that fun, we guessed what colors the water would turn when we mixed them together.  Elena was phenomenal, and knew that pouring blue into the yellow would make green (her favorite color) and that pouring all of them together would make brown.  We credit Curious George goes to school for this bit of knowledge...boy does that monkey love mixing paint.

This was amazingly much less messy than we'd thought it would be.  Both girls seem to have a good hang of pouring for the most part (they frequently pour their own juice or milk into their cereal) so even though these were odd-shaped glasses to pour from there were really only a few spills. And, as the title would indicate above, overall this was a VERY cheap, but fun date.

We also took another page out of Jill's idea book (see where the copycat part of this title comes from?) - she often uses her kids' hands and fingers to make different shapes/art.  We were a bit less brave on the paint front and stuck with washable ink, but both girls loved putting a finger in ink, putting it on the paper, and telling Christina: "Make it into a cat!" or "some ice cream!" or "Rachel!"

We don't stay home in the mornings nearly enough - it was nice to just hang around and have fun together.