What the Water Gave Me: Water Beads

I can't imagine why it took us so long to get on the water bead boat (we've seen so many cool things with them on some of our favorite blogs, including here, here and here), but we are hooked.  Mom bought several different colors from Amazon and put them in a plastic storage bin half full of water (we weren't sure how much water they'd soak up).  We weren't really interested in them until they had grown large (although mom thoroughly seemed to enjoy watching them change) and mom took them out of the large bin for us to play with.  We spent a good amount of time pouring them back and forth between different containers and my pirates thought they were a blast.  And we hauled them up to Nona's house with us and we each took a water bead bath, which was super fun (although not super fun to clean up).

Once ours were really saturated, they squished very easily -- especially the pink.  We didn't mind it, but it drove mom a bit nuts (they apparently were especially difficult to clean up once squished).  So we might commence play a little earlier in the the "growing" process next time.  As an alternative (and as a definite try for us, since it was hard to keep Cami from trying to taste these), check out TinkerLab's tapioca pearl experiment -- it looks awesome and yummy.