Blacklighting with a baby

We love our blacklight and welcome any excuse to plug it in. Lots of activities D has done previously have involved neon paints but as Iz still eats everything we had to get more inventive if she was going to join in the fun... So here are some of the baby-friendly (ie edible!) plays we've done:

First make your glowing liquid. I used two different ones:

- tonic water

- thiamine water

Once you've got these two staples then the possibilities are pretty endless :)

Glow bottles

Get some empty drinking bottles and fill with the liquids above. The tonic water glows bluish while the thiamine water is a much more vibrant yellow. Remember to tape or glue the lid shut if your kids are anything like mine!

Spaghetti

This didn't work well for us. I boiled some uncooked pasta (I used spaghetti as I know that's a firm favourite with my two) in tonic water but the colour was a bit lame tbh. I think it's because the pasta doesn't absorb any of the water, it just cooks in it. But that gave me the idea for the next thing...

Thiamine rice

Much better than spaghetti as the rice actually absorbs lots of the water when cooking (you could also use couscous etc). Cook exactly as you would normally, just change the water. We used thiamine water and the result was amazingly vibrant glowing rice. Fun for scooping, pouring, even making little sandcastles with some plastic shot glasses! 

Glow oobleck

Oobleck is ever popular here so we had to include it and as it's just cornflour and water it's baby-safe :) make as per usual but just with one of the glowing liquids.

We also added some glow sticks to the mix and both D and Iz enjoyed making them into flags, generally waving them and burying them in the oobleck and rice. They had loads of fun and we got a couple of plays out of everything as even all the perishable bits will keep for a couple of days if you store them in the fridge.

And in case any of you are wondering how/where we do our blacklight activities - this is what our set-up looks like. We do it in D's bedroom as that is the most blacked-out room and the blacklight clips onto the top of the cot rim :)

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I'd love to hear if you try any of these and if you have kids who've moved past the eating-everything-stage then I'll post some more (non-edible) blacklight activities next month.