Polar Vortex Cabin Fever

If you haven’t been on social media or turned on the TV in the past couple of days, you may not know that it’s been cold outside for much of the US. Like, really cold.

The arctic conditions arrived for us at the very end of Sunday night. I was a little disappointed that the storm track changed, so instead of getting a lot of snow to go with our frigid weather, we instead had a lot of rain, followed by the cold air. Others may not like the snow, but for me if it’s going to be cold, then bring on the snow and at least make it pretty.

This? Not so pretty.

The kids were supposed to go back to school on Monday. With the below zero temperatures expected, though, the call was made on Sunday night to cancel classes. Honestly? I wasn’t upset about it. I didn’t want the kids to go out in that weather, and I wasn’t really ready for them to go back yet. I mean, I’m ready to get back to a regular routine again, but I’m not ready to deal with the homework arguments or calls home from the school or anxiety breakdowns from Cordy.

Since we were mostly at home over the weekend, getting ready to start school and work again, Monday was a little rough. The morning wasn’t too bad, but by noon the kids were growing tired of each other and bored with everything there was to do in the house. Aaron left work at lunchtime to work from home the remainder of the day, giving me a little bit of a break from the “Make her leave me alone!” and the “Cordy won’t play a game with me, mom, will you?”

But soon the cabin fever was affecting everyone. I started to look for things to do involving the cold weather. Well, other than teaching the kids how to roll towels and jam them in windowsills to keep out the cold air. Although that is a useful skill to teach.

Those who had received the cold air earlier than us (looking at you, Minnesota and Chiberia) had already been discussing things you can only do when it’s super cold outside. Like blowing bubbles that instantly turn into beautiful frozen globes. Or filling balloons with colored water and leaving them outside to become giant marbles when you stripped off the balloon.  The ideas sounded fun, but we were limited to supplies on-hand, which didn’t include bubbles or balloons.

Then I saw the boiling water trick. (Sublimation, if you want the scientific principle behind it.) Hey, we could do that! All we needed was something to hold water and a heat source – I can provide those two things.

So I told Cordy and Mira that if they could give us just a little bit of peace and quiet to get some work done, we’d do a really neat science experiment that would seem like magic at the end of the day. Their curiosity was immediate, and thankfully bought me some solid work time.

When they couldn’t wait any longer, and when Aaron was finished with his work, we started a pot of water on the stove. This took two adults, one to handle the water and one to make a video of it. (Because videotaping it ensured that we could let them watch it again later if needed.) It was about -4 degrees outside, with a -30 wind chill, so conditions were just right.

The result? So much fun:

Mira couldn’t stop giggling, and asked us to do it twice. Actually, she asked us to repeat the experiment several times, but we stopped after two.

And, unlike some videos I saw of the same trick, no one got burned. I only wish we had a super soaker watergun on hand to shoot out the boiling water in style instead of our saucepan method.

Who says science isn’t fun?