Water, Cold, and Time

It's cold here.  Freakishly cold, to the point where even in a city like this were everyone is used to dealing with cold they canceled school because standing at bus stops would be too dangerous.  The high was predicted to be negative nine.

So what to do with an extra day of Winter Break when it's cold?  (Besides stay inside to play board games and bake cookies?)  Make decorative ice!

Yes, fun with ice.

I saw a picture on Facebook last winter of ice balls someone made by filling balloons with water and food coloring and leaving them out to freeze.  They looked beautiful.  We tried it then, but it didn't work.  The water never froze all the way through and we ended up with a cold water splash catastrophe on our porch that made it rather slick for a while.

But this concept was too appealing to abandon (being such relatively cheap entertainment), so we tried it again this year during an impressive cold snap before Christmas.  And it worked!

Quinn helped me.  I filled regular balloons with water and several drops of food coloring, and Quinn lined them up on a bench in the backyard.

The next day we poked one and it cracked and started to leak, so then we left them alone for several days.  But then, success!