Aquarium and Glitter Bottles

This is my little boy. He’s about two and a half months right now. His favorite thing is to bounce and snuggle with his “taggy” blanket. Well I set up this bouncer not thinking he would be able to do it, but figuring I could bounce him while he sat in it. But instead he figured out how to do himself! ( I had to put a box underneath so his feet could touch something and he could stand up to bounce. But it is amazing and provides hours of fun already!)

But that is all beside the point. So he is a little too young to play with this project I saw on Facebook… But I loved it and I didn’t want to forget about it. I thought I might do it now and just keep it around until he was old enough. But I did send the link to my sisters for their kids if they were interested and one of them decided it would be a fun project for the family reunion. She got all materials and brought them too the cabin. So I thought I would share them with you. They are awesome bottles or you can use as a seek and find, or just something cool to shake and look at. We made two different styles, an aquarium and a glittery one. Although I do know the link showed a few others. I don’t have personal pictures of them, but we can talk about them.

Glitter Bottles
So first off you get a water bottle. Laura (the lady who wrote the blog I read) suggested voss water bottles because they look nice…. although I was concerned about the glass. But I didn’t know what other water bottles we could use that wouldn’t look like a water bottle! Well, my sister looked at Laura’s blog a bit harder than I did I guess and found a link to what she recommends buying. Which are smaller voss bottles, that are plastic! But still have that nice, professional, not water bottle shape.

So we drank the water (after all you can’t waste water clear from Norway!!!), cleaned off the bottles and started. The girls wanted to do the glittery bottles. (Imagine that. Girls and glitter!) The instructions say fill it about 3/4 of the way with water, put some baby oil in the water (only a few drops), and then a bit of glitter. Well… we tried it…. and we got clumpy glitter that stuck together and didn’t have that raining shimmery effect that was promised. We tried shaking and shaking and shaking the bottles to no avail they looked awful and the girls were so disappointed. Well one often dads helping (such an amazing dad to help his little girl play with glitter! Don’t worry he is about as good of a manly man as you can get! He’s a firefighter paramedic kinda guy :)) well he decided to add more glitter and see if that would help. It still was a bit clumpy…. but it worked better! Now the fun part is we did clear water with the glitter. But as the glitter sat in the water, the water began to change color. Now it looks pink which just adds to the coolness.

Aquariums

The other was an aquarium in a bottle. (This is what I saw and wanted) Starting with the bottle, add a bit of sand (not much but enough to burry a few things) some mini shells, glass pebbles, and sea creatures. Now of course you can put your own twist on it, and add more or less of these. We then filled it with water.

. The water did not look very clean, so we let the sand settle, poured out most of the water, and filled it again. It looked much better. We then added a drop of blue food color. Some people did one blue and one green to make it look like sea green. It was a little too dark, so we poured some of the colored water out, and added more plain. This made it light enough to see the creatures. Then make sure the water is all the way to the top, so there’s no air bubble, superglue the inside of the lid, and screw it back on tightly. I would then wait for the super glue to dry for at least 20 or 30 minutes before playing with it.

How cool is that?! It’ll make a great car toy, or something quiet for church! To be honest I like playing with it too! 🙂 And soon I want to make more! It would be a great way to teach lessons. You could do one on snow, or safari animals, or anything you can think of! It’s a cool way to keep them entertained and contained!