Magic

Our five-year-old great niece, Miss V, paid us an overnight visit this weekend.

A visit from Miss V is always full of many activities. She's a girl who loves to keep busy and explore the world around her.

When she wasn't expanding her water coloring skills...

...or searching for "fairy hats" as we walked Molly,...

...or coloring or reading or helping me knit by holding the skein of yarn, she was enjoying the "magic trick" I showed her.

I got this idea from "The Mother Huddle," a website that Miss V's mother shared with me, and have been saving this particular trick for the next time Violet visited us.

The next visit finally happened, so I got out the food colors, 8 spoons, a plate, a tray, some vinegar, and some baking soda. Oh, and some water.

Here's what you do:

Put a drop of food coloring in each of 8 spoons. Cover each drop with a mound of baking soda.

Half-fill the eight cups, some with water only, some with vinegar only. Don't let the child know which is contained in which cup! The first time we did this trick, I divided the water/vinegar cups 4:4; the second time, realizing the overflowing, bubbling cups were way more fun than the plain water cups, I went with an 6:2 ratio, 6 being the cups with the vinegar.

Place the tray of water/vinegar cups in front of the child and let him or her go to town.

The cups holding the vinegar will erupt like Mt. Vesuvius when the baking soda/food coloring is added. It makes a wonderful mess, but the mess is contained in the tray.

The cups holding the water will simply turn a pretty color.

And when all of the cups have received their dose of baking soda/food coloring, the fun is not over. Oh, no. Violet spent another half hour or so mixing the filled cups with one another and creating an even more spectacular mess.

We had so much fun with this simple activity that we repeated it the next morning.