Making goop

I had the idea of making goop for the fair. We'll stick it in a cauldron and call it goblin's blood and let kids stick their hands in it and then we would give them a little easter egg of the stuff as a souvenir. I thought this would be a fun in school activity and it was, just not the way I expected it to be.

For starters,goop is best made in small batches, especially if you are using borax which needs to dissolve before you mix it with white glue. I tried to quintuple the recipe. Also, glue is messy and if you decide to be fair and let each child present pour a container of glue into a mixing bowl and you have more than three kids participating, well, there's going to be a mess. Oh yeah, putting a gigantic mixing bowl filled with 40 ounces of glue and 5 cups of water in front of 8 kids and then telling them not to touch it. That doesn't work. Luckily though Cady had been messing around with the borax water and then she plunged her hand into the glue mixture and came up with a hand covered in goop so we realized that the amounts didn't have to be exact. thanks Cady! From there two staff members and I mixed it and the kids played with it. At one point Cady had no shirt on, finn was fooling around with a broom, the kids at the table were slapping goop around and I was measuring out borax as fast as I could while talking to Amelia, or somebody. A staff turned to me and said "This is pretty much what your house is like all the time isn't it?"

After a while I noticed that a few of the little kids had been replaced by some bigger kids. they hung out and played with the goop for a good 20 minutes. again, you've actually got to resist those teachable moments because you know what most of the time it sounds so artificail and pedantic. It was so tempting to get into the chemistry of making goop but I kept my mouth shut. You know why? Because nobody asked me, that's why.

Speaking of ask, a girl asked me to be on her thesis committee. I was very surprised because I don't know this girl very well. But I said yes. I was so surprised and yes, flattered, that every time I ran into her the rest of the day I kept giving her this big smile. Like she had asked me to the prom. Ha! I'm such a geek.