Desert Boy's Experiment

 The other evening, Desert Boy told me, "I have an idea for an experiment. Can we do it?"

Uh, oh, I thought. What are we getting ourselves into now? But I try to be supportive of his scientific endeavors, so I asked him for details.

"We put some baking soda and vinegar into a bottle and put a balloon on top of it and see how a gas makes it inflate. I saw it on Magic Schoolbus."

Well, that sounded like an okay experiment to me. So we gathered our ingredients and decided the sink would be a good place to do the experiment. I didn't know how much baking soda or vinegar, so I took a guess, and told him to put two teaspoons of baking soda into the bottle. Then we poured a 1/4 cup vinegar into a measuring cup. As Desert Boy poured the vinegar, I got ready with the balloon as quick as I could.

 Sure enough, the balloon started inflating! We all were entranced, wondering how big it would get.

The balloon got slightly bigger than you can see in the photo above and stayed that size for about 10 or 15 minutes. It was such a successful experiment, we had to do it again! Next time we may make it more scientific and have him record how much of the ingredients we put in and how big the balloon gets and try out some variations. In the meantime, I'm just happy that it wasn't a messy experiment, and Desert Boy is happy because the experiment worked. Hurray!