Categories: uncategorized
Date: 10 November 2010 08:36:26
There is a volcano in my toilet.
No, I have not got an upset tummy - nor has the Smudgelet - and we have not relocated to Pompeii. There's not even a reason to call Dinorod. But there is a volcano in my toilet.
Building a volcano out of papier mache was a great idea. It was the Smudgelet's half term homework. Funny how having your hands in a bucket full of mashed up newspaper and wallpaper paste can bring back such vivid memories of being in primary school nearly forty years ago - the smell and tactile sensation transported me back so vividly that I could even remember where I was situated in the classroom and who my classmates were at the time when we made our giant papier-mache island. But amongst the other things I remembered was what an eternity it seemed waiting for it to dry out so we could paint it.
The toilet is the warmest room in the flat. If the Smudgelet had told me at the BEGINNING of the holidays that he needed to build a papiermache volcano, it might have been ready in time, but rushing a volcano is no joke. The massive sodden mountain, smelling of wallpaper paste and looking like something you really don't want to think about, is taking for ever to dry. Just like that island did all those years ago. Funny to think of this being a memory that the Smudgelet will recall when making things with his kids in years to come.
When..... if..... it does ever dry out, the plan is to stand a bottle of diet coke inside it and drop a mint in. Apparently it should be quite spectacular. Apparently there are some amazing videos of the same experiment on You-tube. I can't bring myself to look. Two days (and nights) of shredding paper, soaking paper, mulching paper, modelling with paper, struggling to get the stodgy mess of gunge and black ink from under fingernails.... several weeks of negotiating a drying mountain in the loo.... all destroyed in a single burst of cocacola bubbles.