Thinking Outside the Bath…Toys

Water Balloon Baths

Water balloons are so much fun to play with. My kids beg for them all summer. But we wanted to find a way to still be able to play with them in the winter, so we brought them into the bath!

Option 1: Fill up a bunch of balloons at the tap and plop them into the tub.

The balloons bobbed around the tub and the kids had so much fun. Zach got so attached to his balloon that he cried really hard when he found out that water balloons have to stay in the tub, and he couldn’t take his to bed with him.

Option 2: Fill balloons with warm water. Use permanent marker to make faces on them. Let the kids cuddle with their warm balloon “water babies.”

A friend does this for her kids with medical gloves when the kids are bored, waiting in the doctor’s office.

Balloon Type: These days there are specific water balloons you can buy at Canadian Tire or the Dollar Store, but for this, I actually prefer using real balloons. They are less likely to break when you don’t want them to.

Those Accordion Tubes

Okay, don’t ask me what these are called, but I’m sure you’ve seen them before. They sell them at the Bargain Shop in town. They are tubes that stretch out and fold back to be short. It turns out they make incredible bath toys! They can be used for blowing bubbles and shooting water out of like a whale’s blow hole. When I gave one to all three kids, it looked like a jacuzzi tub!

Big Lego

Although the Lego didn’t stay together quite as well when slippery, it floated nicely and dried out well after the bath. They play with it pretty regularly anyway, but it was suddenly more interesting because it was in the tub.

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Note: Make sure to break up the skewers before throwing them out, or you will end up with a hole in the bag and garbage water all over the bottom of your garbage bin.