Anatomy of Another Mess

Here we go again!  Today's mess is brought to you by RICE!

This time around I finally took some good advice and put down a shower curtain before getting started with the activity.  Here we have Baby A. doing a quality-control check:

Once the shower curtain was arranged according to Baby A.'s standards, I brought in the toddlers and gave each one a tub of colored rice.

I'm somewhat embarrassed to point out that once again, it appears I dressed the kids in the family uniform: stripes.  They really do have other shirts, I promise!

At first the kids had fun just using their hands to play in the rice.

But before long, they were asking for the "tools": an assortment of scoops, spoons,  measuring cups, and funnels.  They were most excited by the funnels, because the only other time we've used them was with beans which are too big to fall through the funnel, which defeats the whole purpose of using a funnel, right?

But of course, soon enough the funnels were put to other uses:

I did my best to stay out of the way and not be too controlling, but I couldn't help but bark, "You're being too wild!"  "Keep the rice in the tub!"  "No eating the rice!" and "No throwing tools!" every now and then.

As you can see, there was a lot of spillage. But 90% of the mess was contained to the shower curtain. Nice!

Finally, in the interest of full disclosure and lest anyone thinks I'm mother of the year for letting my kids play with rice, you should know they watched cartoons for two hours while I got everything ready.  So now you know the truth!