Ice, ice, baby! With just a tray or two of ice cubes, you and Baby can have endless fun with ice games. Well, endless might be the wrong word, but you can definitely have fun until the ice melts! What can you do with ice?
Eat it
Chewing ice cubes isn’t a good idea because of the harm the hard cubes can cause to your teeth, but shaved ice is a different story! If you can shave or crush ice in a blender, you just have to add fruit or syrup to make homemade snow cones. You can mix colors, flavors, and see who can make the biggest, most beautiful snow cone.
Paint with it
When you go to freeze your ice cubes, stir in a little food coloring or powder from drink mixes into the water. When the ice cubes are frozen, you can move them across paper to create colorful art with Baby. You’ll want to make sure these masterpieces are created either outside or in a waterproof area so that as the ice melts, the “art” doesn’t spread to your table or floor.
Throw it
You can use ice cubes just like you would a ball, a wet, slippery, freezing ball. You can play toss ’em, catch ’em, or use them to knock targets off a ledge – and not even need to worry about cleaning up afterwards, as the evidence melts. You’ll want to do all of this outside, of course. And be careful: ice cubes can be really fun to throw and play with, but they’re also pretty hard little projectiles, so make sure you never throw them too hard in a person’s direction. Underhand tosses, people!
Build it
You can actually use a combination of paper towels and salt to stabilize ice cubes enough to stack them into your very own ice sculptures! You can make abstract houses, towers, or anything you can think of, really. Once you and Baby have your structures just how you like them (build on paper towels and use salt in between each layer to keep the cubes from slipping), you can stick your creation in the freezer to really solidify it. Build on a portable surface like a cookie sheet to make transportation easier.
Freeze it
An underrated activity you can do with ice is making it! Search your home for teeny tiny things you can put into your ice trays and trap in an eternal ice age…temporarily. When they’re good and frozen, you can take the ice cubes out and play with their frozen captives, or you can set them free by melting them or chipping away at them.
With a little imagination, there are a million ways to play with ice on a hot summer day, and you and Baby are in charge of finding them all!
