Chilly Halloween Fun

The day after planting a slew of new seeds, I invited a bunch of preschoolers over for a Halloween playdate, and of course we ended up in the backyard (NO WALLS CAN CONTAIN US!) and of course some of my seeds got trampled, or - let us say - worked deeper into the earth. We'll see what comes of them.

But it was worth it, because we were doing an awesome Halloween spooky ice activity - frozen hands with surprises inside. Tipped off by Anne from Left Brain Craft Brain to the post at Happy Hooligans, I prepped the latex gloves at noon, dumping a large portion of liquid red food coloring in each. I got them out of the freezer at 4 PM. They were mostly frozen and in fact if they had all been entirely solid it would have taken the kids a lot longer to harvest their toys. The project's mess was all contained in the yard, where the grass was in its death throes anyway. (The red does get all over fingers and clothes - could have used a couple of those gloves for myself!)

The three-year-old kids all loved digging in their icy hands for some period time, varying by attention span, but my big first grader may have enjoyed it the most. He didn't have any parental help (because I was scurrying around distributing supplies to everyone else), and he took the longest, extracting his toys and applying salt with almost surgical precision. He told me later that it was so much fun it made everything else about the day "boring". Um, sorry?

I was too rushed to follow the Happy Hooligans suggestion about removing the gloves carefully, so we did break some fingers and the moms amused ourselves by staging them in some unused dirt a la fresh corpses. Classy. Thanks to Anne for the photos!

I'm both glad and sad nobody got a photo of the "bloody" pile of surgical gloves left at the end. Revolting!