Somewhere there is a photo that Alexis will some day hand to her psychologist and say, "This. THIS is why I'm here." She was probably around a year old when it was taken and it's of her sitting in the middle of our grassy yard screaming her bloody head off with her arms stretched to the sky as she pleads with the gods of toddler pity to saaaaaaaave her from the hooorrrrible grass.
I discovered very early that the kid hates getting her hands dirty. It's possible that I used that to my advantage for a long time. If you sat her down in the grass, she would stay there because she wasn't willing to let her precious paws touch the filthy grass.
Do you know how much you can get done when your toddler is rendered immobile by nature?
It was pretty fantastic.
But then one day the kid had the nerve to go and figure out how to stand up without using her hands. My fun and games were over, except that I kept figuring out new ways to screw with the kid and her dirty hands neurosis. You will never ever catch her touching a bathroom wall because I once told her just how many germs were on those walls. She might lick one of those walls, but she won't put her hands on them.
Recently She Who Freaks Out About Dirty Hands has been taking her other flavor of crazy to a new level. She is not and has never been a good sleeper. At all. Still, when my six-year old repeatedly throws herself at me at 2:00 in the morning bawling because there are ants in her bed, I start considering revenge. She's been waking me up two or three times per night for the past few weeks and I AM SO DONE WITH IT.
There are no ants. I've proven it to her a dozen times, but she forgets that inconvenient fact in the middle of the night.
Enter homemade slime. I realize it makes no sense at all to make your kid make slime as punishment for waking you up all of the time, but remember that part about her waking me up all of the time? I'm so tired I'm no longer coherent. What's that squirrel alphabet spaghetti?
Slime is super easy to make. It's just a teaspoon of Borax, a cup of water, and some school glue (we used clear school glue because I wanted see-through slime).
I called Alexis over and told her my plan. We were going to make slime to put in some jars as Halloween decorations. Here's the thing, though. Slime doesn't just magically POOF itself into existence. You start by dissolving the Borax into the water. Then you put some glue in a bowl with some food coloring (if you want it to be colored, that is). Then you pour a little of the Borax water into the glue bowl and ... well, it looks like this.
It's very "unset Jell-O" like both in look and feel. You have to mush it and squeeze it and squish it for a few minutes to get it to turn into slime.
Oh, Alexis! Guess who gets to squish the slime!
She should have HATED it.
She didn't. At all.
Dammit.
At least I got some fun slime out of the attempted torture. And, hopefully I planted the seeds of some spider nightmares while I was at it. I'm done with the ants, after all.
