Easter Egg Colored Rice (Rainbow Rice)

 

(25 Months)

Little Miss and Wild One ask to play with their rice bucket almost everyday.  I've seen countless blogs of brave moms who will let their little ones play with their rice buckets inside the house, and those same moms have these amazing toddlers who are so careful about not spilling the rice or making a mess (you know who you are Montessori mommas- I envy you).  I haven't put enough time into teaching my kidabunks to carefully transfer the rice from one container to another without spilling (I need to start working on that, I'll add it to my growing list of things to try next week  - it's seems to be always next week).

After seeing a beautiful post from Pink and Green Mama about Rainbow Rice, I decided it was time to add some color to our boring white rice.  While the kiddos were playing with one of their Thomas the Train sets (they really like this one), I began following her instructions (while thinking to myself, ok this should take about half hour, then I'll start dinner).  40 minutes later, I'm still dying the rice.  60 minutes later, I'm still dying rice.  It took me almost an hour and a half to dye the rice (I dyed about eight pounds- which fills our rice bucket about 1/2 way).

The finished product is beautiful, isn't it?  Look at that gorgeous rainbow.  It looks like waves of color.

As you can see we play with our rice bucket outside on an old sheet (to help catch some of the mountains of spilled rice).  My husband was impressed with the finished product, but warned me that the rice will probably only stay separated for about three seconds before the four tiny hands start swirling the rice together.  It happened so fast!  One second the colors were separated and just a few seconds later...

Little MIss kept saying, "Pink!  Pink!"  Then when the rainbow turned into a jumble of color, she started asking, "Where did the pink go?"   Wild One excitedly said, "yellow, colors, look colors!"

This is what it looks like now.  I have to admit, the colored rice does look more fun.  Everything is more fun in a rainbow of color.