Homemade lava lamps keep bored kids busy

I've noticed that a lot of people who have children look pinched at this time of year. The weather is bad and the kids are inside and they're bored. And they're not afraid to say it. Often.

Of course, back before Children's Rights, we weren't allowed to be bored. If we said we were bored we'd get one response: "Go on outside, NOW." It didn't matter how bad the weather was. You had to go. Your revenge was to get as muddy as possible doing commando crawl through the dead vegetable patch, or as wet as possible performing ice dam maintenance in the ditch, or as cold as possible lying immobile in a snow bank in full view of the kitchen window, going for sympathy. (That never worked.)

Knowing the consequences of uttering the B-word forced children to find alternatives to being bored. For example, when my Mum was grocery shopping I would experiment with having a rare disease, trawling slowly down the aisles making loud guttural sounds, refusing assistance. That usually made my Mum hurry to get out of the store.

For trips to the hardware store (which wasn't yet a summit of fascination), I learned to crouch in the tile section and make the exact sound of a sheep in labour. You may think I'm kidding.

It was a shock to find out that I could be sent outside, even at the store.

So as it happened, I spent a lot of time in store parking lots. Determined not to be bored, I imagined the metal shopping carts were lonely and suffering from hypothermia. I would bundle the shivering carts together and herd them into the store like a concerned medic.

Only maturity put a stop to this. Sort of. I still take orphan carts back to the corral at Home Depot, but I no longer make siren sounds or scream for triage.

Pitcher This

My Mum had one magical trick for preventing boredom on winter weekends and you may remember it. Or you may simply need it. Now.

Here it is:

Supplies

• Transparent pitcher or vase
• Water
• Vinegar
• Baking soda
• Food colouring
• Choice of rice, sliced grapes, glitter, bits of broken uncooked spaghetti, raisins, or my favourite, mothballs. [Safety alert: Mothballs are toxic. Don't use them around very young children, who have the right to eat them.]

Steps

1. Fill the pitcher three-quarters full of water.
2. Add enough vinegar to almost fill the container.
3. Slowly sprinkle a heaping teaspoon of baking soda into the pitcher. (No dumping, or you'll get a wild fizz of volcanic spume.)
4. When the bubbles have quieted down a bit, add another teaspoonful of baking soda. Wait for the bubbles to die down again.
5. Add a few drops of food colouring, not so much that you get the pitchy opacity of chemical waste.
6. Gently drop some rice (or other stuff from the list above) into the mixture. It'll sink, but wait for a moment as carbon dioxide bubbles build up on its surface. Soon the object levitates to the surface, then starts bobbing up and down in an unpredictable cycle.
7. Note: After a while you may need to add more vinegar and baking soda to re-invigorate the chemical reaction. Sometimes the bounce lasts a whole day, although the kids' attention span probably won't.
8. Set up several pitchers with multiple installations including "Space Invaders Caught in a Blizzard" (Slice off the tops of grapes to make tiny flying saucers, and throw in lots of rice to make the blizzard) or "Snowball Speed Trials" (mothballs, numbered with magic marker, so each kid can keep score for his snowball) or "My Tonsils Won't Die" (cut up two pieces of sun-dried tomato and put them in a small jar of the vinegar/soda mixture. They bounce up and down looking just like possessed human tissue. Great impact for Show and Tell).

This ersatz lava lamp is one of the highlights of my youth and I decided to try it out on three young friends to see if it still worked as an anti-boredom device. The experiment kept Avalon, Sydney and Madeleine Lepard fascinated for over an hour before I had to send them outside.