theme week cheat sheet: rainbow week
rainbow week
books
Pros:
- Awesomely teaches kids what happens when you mix colors, and seamlessly leads into a paint-mixing activity, if you're strong enough that day.
- Short and sweet. God bless children’s authors who understand the value of word economy.
Cons:
- Those mice have red eyes and they are creepy as fuck. But I have a rodent thing.
Pros:
- Inspired Chicken to request Rainbow Stew for lunch
Cons:
- Vegetable soup is not, in fact, rainbow colored.
DIS IS JUST BROWN.
Pros:
- Rhythmic and fun to read
- Color photographs
- Covers a lot of veggies you don’t usually see in kid's books – kohlrabi, anyone?
Cons:
- None.
outings
Whole Foods
Taste the rainbow
Pros:
- Your kid is not going to be constipated tomorrow.
- Most Whole Foods markets have a little café where you can sit and taste your rainbow.
- You can buy groceries here.
Cons:
- Hella cash money at Whole Foods.
- Any time you eat out with a 3-year-old, a 1-year-old, or both, you run the risk of having to apologize after your kid pelts a diner with a hunk of pineapple.
Pro Tips:
- Bring something rainbow-colored to the grocery store to keep you both focused. "We've got something red and something orange. What else do we need?" I just drew lines on a paper.
- At Whole Foods, they have free fruit by customer service for the kids. So at least you don't have to buy a banana.
- Those little white condiment cups I snagged from a free sample spot in the store. I probably should have brought some Dixie cups from home.
Spray Park
Find a rainbow in the sprinkler spray
Pros:
- It’s really amazing when the kids spot an ACTUAL rainbow shimmering in the mist.
- You're at a motherfucking spray park. This is why summer was invented. Or maybe it's the other way around. Who can say. It's a chicken-and-the-egg thing.
Cons:
- The chances of them spotting an actual rainbow shimmering in the mist hover around 4%. The rainbows fade in and out. But to be honest, kids don’t care about rainbows when they’re at a motherfucking spray park.
- You have to leave a motherfucking spray park. No child wants to leave a spray park, ever. So you will have to strip a soggy, pee-soaked swim diaper off of a cold, wet baby with the iron-clad defiance of a Kurdish freedom fighter and the jointless elasticity of a sea otter. Twice.
Car Wash
Watch the rainbow soap help the car get nice and clean
Pros:
- The children are strapped down.
- You get some actual grown-up shit done.
Cons:
- You better pray there’s rainbow soap, or just don’t bring up the possibility of rainbow soap. Trust me, you don’t want to be locked in a steel box, having sold rainbow soap hard for the last hour, only to discover they’re just doing white soap today.
- I guess car washes can be terrifying for children? I don't get it. It’s just a loud, giant, whipping, rubber-strap-beating-wheel descending on the window right by their faces. Kids are dumb.
Cupcake Royale
We happened to be doing our Rainbow Week during Pride,
so they had a rainbow cupcake called "The Gay."
You could also hit an ice cream shop for rainbow sherbet.
Pros:
- You're at a motherfucking cupcake shop.
Cons:
- You better find somewhere to take cover once that sugar gets metabolized.
food
Rainbow cheerios
aka Fruit Loops
aka, if you bought them at Whole Foods during Taste the Rainbow Challenge, Cascadian Farm Organic Fruit Loops that cost $6 a box.
Rainbow fruit salad
Just regular fruit salad that has been brilliantly re-branded to be on-message for Rainbow Week. You're welcome.
Rainbow pasta with veggies
We bought this one from Amazon. It was not cheap. You can also make your own rainbow pasta with food coloring, if you're more ambitious than I am.
arts, crafts, activities
Basically your old baking-soda-vinegar-volcano, except it uses powdered citric acid rather than vinegar. Result? A slower but longer-lasting eruption. OMG, so fun. We drove plastic cars through the foam and called it a car wash. It was awesome.
Until the children started to say "ouch," and "Mommy it burns."
Yeah, if your kids have tiny cuts on their hands (and whose kid doesn't have dinged-up digits?) then this is basically like telling them to play in a cup of lemon juice.
EVERYBODY INTO THE BATH! NOW!
If I had to do it again...
I wouldn't do it with other people's kids. When you're hosting a fun craft day at your house, "Mommy, it burns" is like #3 on the list of shit you really don't want to hear. And I'd check to see if my kid had open paper cuts first.
Rainbow Bouquet
1. Buy white flowers - we used carnations but roses are also popular on the internet.
2. Drop a few drops of food coloring into different vessels - we did 5. Chicken picked 4 good colors and then brown. Brown. OK. Whatever.
3. Put a white flower into each of the vessels that now has colored water in it.
4. Wait. Check the flowers periodically over the next few days - you'll start to see veins of color in the white petals.
If I had to do it again...
Meh. It was cool for a second. And then I just had dead carnations on the windowsill for like 2 weeks. "Throw away dead flowers" ranks just above "make a dentist appointment" on my priority list. Which is to say, it is second from the very, very bottom of my priority list, until something starts to smell dead.This looked really fun and easy.
We added way, way too much food coloring.
We made black glue discs of death.
If I had to do it again...
I wouldn't, until my kids were old enough to really just do one drop of food coloring. The key to crafts with this age (1 and 3) is you have to find things where more is more. The toddler years aren't known for being a time of restraint and subtlety.
Mixing paint colors
Definitely the big winner of the arts and crafts this week.
1. Make a "palette" of the three primary colors (red, yellow, blue)
2. Rolled out a big piece of paper. (We have one of the $5 rolls from IKEA)
3. Take a glob of one color and a glob of another color, and mix them together on the big piece of paper, to see what color you can make.
Chicken squealed "ooooh what's it gonna be???" as we stirred paints together. And once we were done mixing colors, we traded in our paintbrush for a cork and stamped circles all over the paper.
If I had to do it again...
I totally would, no changes, this was so fun. Chicken loved it because there were no real rules. We had no agenda. This was pure exploration.
Rainbow collage
OMG it was such a good idea.
What if we painted a rainbow at the beginning of the week, and found objects throughout the week that we could glue onto the different colors of the rainbow, as a reminder that the rainbow is all around us if we slow down and look around?
THIS RAINBOW COLLAGE IS A LIE.
I did 90% of it myself. Chicken painted the green. And I think he glued on one of those squeezy pouch caps. And then he ripped it off. And then I glued it back on.
It was me. I made it. I painted it. I collected the shit. I glued it on.
I made it all.
If I had to do it again...
I would do it with a different child. My kid doesn't seem to give a shit about cumulative long-form installation art. Clearly he needs more kale.
rainbow week recap
In the car, you can play "I Spy Colors." Every book you read has a rainbow of colors in it somewhere.
Chicken made this rainbow car out of Mega Bloks for like 2 days straight.
- Gotta say, the best part of rainbow week was Friday morning's tremendous, about-damn-time, heart-busting, God-bless-America-ing decision by SCOTUS to recognize gay marriage in every state in our union.
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| Hell yes we made rainbow one love onesies |
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| I'll drink to that. |