Lava Lamps and Pudding

I've been trying to find more things for Connor and myself to do that will keep him occupied so that I don't spend the day yelling at him and pulling my hair out.  So to keep myself from early baldness I turned to the internet.  We've been looking at different learning game sites for preschoolers.  We've come across a couple of them, not quite what I'm looking for but Connor's had fun just being able to play with Momma's computer.

On one of these websites a video was playing in the top corner called At The Craft Table.  The lady was telling how to make a homemade lava lamp with just water, vegetable oil, food coloring and kosher salt.  She demonstrated by putting food coloring in a jar of water, pouring in oil and adding the salt.  The salt would push the oil down to the bottom and as the salt dissolved it would release the oil back to the top in pretty bubbles.  I turned to Connor and said, "We can do that!" and he was all for it.

Now, I can cook, I know my way around a kitchen and know about different ingredients, but I'm not an accomplished chef.  I didn't have Kosher salt and thought, surely sea salt or regular salt would work just as well as Kosher salt.  I have no idea what Kosher salt is, but apparently there's a difference.  But I'll get to that.

So we start our experiment.  I found an empty jar, grabbed the vegetable oil, food coloring and sea salt.  After all the salt in the lava lamp ladies video looked big and chunky, sea salt is big and chunky.  

        So I drop a few drops of food coloring in the water and mix it up

        I let Connor pour in the 1/3 cup of oil and we wait for it to settle. 

         Once settled, we pour in the salt and watch for a lava lamp effect.  There are a few little bubbles, but nothing like what had been in the video. 

 So I thought maybe we would have more luck with the other salt.  So I dump that experiment in the sink, rinse out the jar and we try again.  Water, food coloring, green this time, oil, wait for it to settle and pour in the salt.  This time we get more bubbles, but still, not like what had been in the video.  Oh well, I guess it really does take Kosher salt to make a lava lamp.  Or I could just go plug up my old lava lamp I got when I was a teenager.

So when that didn't work I turned to Connor and said, "Let's make something I know will work: Instant Pudding". He like that idea too.  Of course he wanted to help with this 'experiment' as well!

 He dumped in the pudding.... (You can see our second lava lamp attempt sitting there too)

 Poured in the milk....

 And mixed it all together....

After we made the pudding, we had to lick the mixers, that's just part of making pudding.

We may not have gotten a home made lava lamp to work, but at least we got some good pudding out of it.  I love to do things with Connor and watch him learn how things work.  Sometimes, things don't work the way we expect them to.  All we can do when that happens is say oh well, and make some pudding!   I'm trying to teach Connor that sometimes it takes more than one try to get something right, and sometimes it's not going to work at all, but that's okay too.  As long as he tried.  

So all in all we've had a good day with lava lamps and chocolate pudding.