How to Buy Yourself One Hour On a Rainy Day

Although winter looks like it's gearing up to give New England one more punch in the face tonight, I will stubbornly cling to both hope and science and believe that someday spring will, in fact, arrive.

And around here, with spring comes rain.
And rain.
And rain and rain and rain.
See?

Farm down the road from us.  Under mucho water, thanks to the Farmington River

And like mothers everywhere, although I fantasize about sending the kids outside with nails and some boards and tell them to make an ark and just give me an hour of peace, please, I've never actually done it.  Generally speaking, I let them back in when it starts raining.

So I'd like to share with you my fail proof tip for buying yourself an hour of peace, resulting in zero extra cleanup for you.  Because I love you.

Our bathroom.  Which does not actually look this clean in real life, but I shamelessly tinkered with the output levels on Photoshop so it looks like I keep a sparkling white bathroom at all times.

Ha.

Anyway, take one bathroom, two or three glow sticks per kid (Michael's sells them by the hundred for pretty cheap), and a pair of scissors.

Crack the stick, cut the tip off one end, and have the kids flick the stick at the shower walls with all their might.

Then, turn off the lights.

Repeat.
Worry not about cleanup, since next time someone takes a shower, the glow stick juice washes away.

And while your kids are happily conducting their own child-friendly rave, you can spend that blissful hour doing something productive.

Or not.


UPDATE:  Because quite a few of you asked for more specifics, allow me to give details.

1. Over here, the 4 year old on up does this.  The 2 year old can't muster enough force to fling the juice out of the stick, so he just plays with a lit, uncut glowstick in the dark bathroom.
2. The kids stand next to the tub and fling.  Some juice does get on the floor, but if you show them to fling with a sideways, across the body motion, rather than over the head, you don't get juice on the ceiling.
3. The "before" picture of my bathroom is actually taken while all the juice is still on the tub.  It's really mostly non-noticeable in the light.  Any juice that doesn't get washed away in the tub gets removed next time I condescend to do a wipe down of the bathroom.  No special cleanup other than my usual swipe of surfaces with Lysol wipes and a sponge mop.
4. The kids also like finger painting with the juice.  It's not toxic, but I wouldn't let them eat it or anything.  Just because the seems like asking for trouble, even to me.
5. I'm aware that "glow stick juice" is not the technical term.  It's actually dibutyl phthalate, which I only know because I just googled "Is glow stick juice toxic" just to make sure I wasn't accidentally advising y'all to poison your kids.  (I'm not)