Cabin Fever Cures: Soap Snowballs

What do you do when the under-four-feet crowd in your crib is fussy and sick, and Mother Nature apparently is too?  

You let the wee ones take extra-long baths, splashing and playing with whatever floats their boats.  One of these bath time events involved snowballs made of Ivory soap shavings smooshed around miniature tundra inhabitants.

I actually made these soap snowballs with little Polar animals in them for Sarah when she was about two, after I got the idea from Family Fun magazine.  The first attempt did not go so well.  Suffice it to say, two-year-olds and grownup soap are a bad combination: burning eyes, tears, and screaming ensued, and the activity was shelved.  Until now.

So, I hauled out the cheese shredder for the second time ever, and used three bars of soap to make a big fluffy pile of shavings.  Now, I used Ivory soap for this.  I don't know if you could use another kind, but I suspect the consistency wouldn't be quite right to pack the snowballs nicely.

              I put the shavings in a gallon plastic bag, 

                                         threw the animals in,

            and packed the shavings around the animals, layer by layer. 

Plop these babies in warm water and let the kids go to town freeing the animals from their "icy" traps.

Unlike a few of my experiments lately, Sarah and Will had a blast with these.  So much so, in fact, they keep asking for more snowballs.  Will also slept with his "Blooga" whale clutched in is chubby fist two nights in a row, and Sarah thinks her Native American name should be "Dancing Polar Bear".  I think I'll keep this in my bag of tricks for when the weather turns bad again.

Happy Wednesday!