Playdough Saturday!

Things are always different when we're at my parents' place. They live on a four acre permaculture smallholding and for an HSP (that's a whole other blog post waiting to happen) it's so much easier for me there. This morning I felt capable of making playdough. It's been a long time. I'm not sure if I've ever made it with my children, but I have great memories of it as a child, the smell of it, the salty taste on my hands, making all sorts of shapes and things with it. Since three-year-old Ben's teacher had just recommended him playing with playdough to strengthen his hands for writing it seemed like the perfect time.

I wanted to find a recipe that didn't include cream of tartar, because I was sure we wouldn't have that in the house, and I don't remember it being in the recipe as a child. Luckily I found one on the Cbeebies site that was perfect. A bit awkward that it was in cups (and surprising for a British site) but we had some measuring cups in the drawer, so it was all good. Once we'd mixed the salt, flour, and cornflour I split the mixture in half and coloured half of it red and half blue.

The children had plenty of fun helping me make the dough, and the fun continued once it was kneaded into balls and out on the table. With the help of the cutters I used as a child and various other kitchen bits and bobs they have spent the morning making shapes, mountains, babies in cradles, graves for their Lego men (that was George. He has an interesting mind), pancakes and ice cream.

For an added bonus, while I had the cornflour out, I decided to introduce them again to non-Newtonian fluids, which flow when they're not under pressure but go hard when force is applied. We've shown Oscar and George this before, but I don't think they remembered. I mixed a bowl of cornflour with a little water and put it on the table to show them how it worked. Ben was a little freaked out at first, but Oscar and George were fascinated and George spent at least three quarters of an hour deeply engrossed in this single bowl of cornflour. Now Ben is pretending it's Mount Doom from Lord of the Rings and is digging it out onto the table.

We got a little science in with this, discovering that these fluids work as they do because on the microscopic level you have little grains of solid in a suspension in a liquid. When the fluid moves slowly the particles can move past one another, but under impact there's no time for the particles to move aside and make way, and so they behave like a solid.

Of course as an HSP parent I'm exhausted now and they're still going strong four or five hours later. There's playdough everywhere. But they're having fun, and that's what counts.

What's Under Your Sink?

A plunger? Cleaning cloths? Bleach? Antibacterial spray? Febreeze?

'Poison' by Cavin on Flickr (license)

'Every week around 500 children under five [in the UK] are rushed to hospital because it's thought they have swallowed something poisonous.' (Source: nidirect.gov.uk)

I remember this kind of incident in my own childhood (due to berries on a blackberrying trip not household substances.) Being taken off to hospital by worried parents. Orange juice with an emetic concealed inside. Staying in hospital overnight. The high bars of the hospital cot. Even if no ill effects unfold, the repercussions of possibly ingesting something poisonous are unpleasant for both parent and child.

I want to address a fundamental strangeness in the way we organise our kitchens. To be clear, it's the way I organise my kitchen too. We have cleaning products under the sink. Pretty much everyone does. My parents do and always have, as far as my memory goes. Almost every house I've been in, when I've had cause to look under the sink, shows the same arrangement. Bleach? Under the sink. Window cleaner? Under the sink. Dettol? Under the sink.

We don't keep a lot of chemicals at home (and when I say chemicals I mean cleaning fluids and the like. Of course everything is composed of chemicals, from the H₂O in the taps to the O and CO₂ in the air we breathe.) Most things come clean with water or water and a little washing up liquid (Ecover if the supermarket has it.) It's best for the environment and your personal health not to rely on too many nasty chemicals. But still, I don't want my boys indulging in their own form of speakeasy on the kitchen floor.

'Chemistry Bottles With Liquid Inside,' zhouxuan12345678, cropped. (License)

Do most children show an interest in swigging bleach from the bottle or rummaging in the medicine cabinet? None of mine ever have. They're very clear on 'that's medicine' (it's all under lock and key anyway), or 'that's a nasty chemical.' They know not to touch. But Ben, in particular, loves cleaning. It's one of those things I pray he won't grow out of. He's forever rummaging under the sink and coming out with cleaning spray so he can 'help' clean up.

So why do we keep our cleaning fluids under the sink? What's the point? Why spend time fitting child locks and desperately trying to barricade the cupboard? (In our previous residence we used a stick to 'lock' the doors.) I understand that you don't want to put certain things under the sink, but there are plenty of things that could be stored there. Tinned food. Food in plastic and glass containers. That could fill a whole cupboard, and meanwhile all your horrible bleaches and sprays could be up at adult eye level, well out of the reach of little hands and mouths.

So isn't it time for a fundamental reorganisation of our kitchens, and of our mindset regarding where things 'should' be kept? Do we have to keep our bleach under the sink because Mrs Jones next door does, and so does Mr Hughes the next door down, and so do your parents, and so do your friends? Educate your children about what's safe and what's not, but if you can, keep dangerous substances out of reach.

[A little post-script. It's not only cleaning products and medicines that can be harmful. When George was younger I invited him to smell some powered ginger. Instead of sniffing he blew, and the powder billowed up right into his eyes. On that occasion we rushed him straight to A&E where the doctor confirmed that ginger was one of the most painful things you could have in your eyes. He had to have anaesthetic eye drops for three or four days afterwards. And it's not just ginger. The more obvious one is nutmeg. The ingestion of 'five or more grams of nutmeg causes acute nutmeg poisoning.' (Source: toxnet.nlm.nih.gov) Be careful with spices as well as the more conventionally 'dangerous' kitchen items! ]