Water Beads!

The Dollar Tree Alternative

My kiddlets love looking at blogs with me, and often when I look at Play At Home Mom Elizabeth tells me that she wants to try EVERY SINGLE THING. Who can blame her? They do some fun stuff over at PAHM! I wanna try it all too! The big thing I've been wanting to try out is water beads. Everyone has been doing them, so it was definitely our turn to give them a go! The problem for us was the cost. Lots of the beads cost an arm & a leg, and since they are easily destroyed when playing with, I didn't want to pay a ton on them. 

While at the dollar store getting craft stuff I ran across these!

Well, I had to give them a try! The beads in the vase are teeny tiny and needed hydrated, so it was a fun experiment to let the girls dump them in the vase and watch them grow over night. Lou dumped them in, but wasn't interested in them growing. Lizzy however, loved watching how big they were getting every few hours. They grew bigger than the ready hydrated clear ones. We got a total of 2 of the vase beads (green & blue) and 2 containers of the clear beads, and they came together in a big bowl wonderfully! 

I'm very pleased that the dollar store beads work so well. They don't have as many colors, sadly, so we will most likely be looking at a multi-colored set on Amazon to get the kids as stocking stuffers (who wouldn't want water beads in their stockings!), and to have some on hand for when we just can't go outside (getting cold here!). But for now, these are great! We haven't played with them too much, but we have big plans this weekend!