★★★★★
Just one more mold
"My son keeps asking for just one more mold, he loves it."
Advertorial
5 Reasons He Stopped Asking For The Tablet Every Afternoon
I handed my four-year-old the tablet six times before 11 a.m. on a Tuesday. I only know the number because I had started counting.
I spent six months trying to take the screen away from him. Nothing worked, and I was tired of feeling like the problem. What finally changed things was not a rule. It was one afternoon in September and a bowl of water on the kitchen table.
These are the five reasons I think it worked, including the one I did not see coming.
1
It Wins The First Ten Seconds
This is the part I had wrong for months. I kept buying crafts. Crayons lasted eleven minutes. Modeling clay got rolled into a ball and handed back to me. A sticker book cost twelve dollars and lasted one afternoon.
A four-year-old gives you about ten seconds to be more interesting than a screen, and none of those were.
This is not really a craft. It is a chemical reaction you can hold. You stir a spoonful of powder into a bowl of water, dip a mold, squeeze the colored gel into it and shake it out under the water. It becomes a solid little creature in about a second. Not drying. Not setting. There.
I tried it alone at the kitchen table the night it arrived, because if it was going to be a disappointment I wanted to have that privately. I said whoa out loud, on my own, at 9:40 at night. That is when I knew it would work on him.
2
He Cannot Get It Wrong
Most crafts punish a four-year-old for being four. There is a right way, he cannot do it, he gets frustrated, and it is over before I have finished setting it up.
There is no wrong way to squeeze the gel. His first one came out lopsided and he did not care even slightly, because it still worked. It comes out as something every single time.
★★★★★
"This actually works and was so fun! Great activity that an 8 year old was able to do on her own after some help in the beginning."
He had made nine before I looked up from my laptop.
3
It Runs Without Me
I work from home. The honest reason the tablet won for six months is that it was the only thing that did not need me to run it.
Setup takes about two minutes. After that he does it himself. I am at the table with him, but I am not the activity — and that difference is the whole thing for anyone who is working while their kid is home.
★★★★★
"As a mom, I appreciate that this product entertained my 5 year old from 10am-7pm. No joke."
It is made for ages 3 and up. I sat with him for the first two rounds, then he took it over.
4
It Is A Bowl Of Water And Food-Grade Ingredients
My husband got home, saw the state of our son's hands, and asked the obvious question first.
The powder is food-grade calcium lactate, the same thing used in cheese and in fruit preservation. The gels are sodium alginate, which comes from seaweed. Non-toxic, biodegradable, ages 3 and up.
It is not zero mess. It is water and colored gel, so we put a towel down. But it wipes up with a paper towel and everything lives in the box it came in, which is a different category from paint on the wall.
5
He Comes And Gets Me
Here is the one I did not see coming, and it is the reason I am writing any of this down.
Around 5:30 he got off his chair, came around the table, took my hand and pulled. Mom, come see.
He had not done that since March. I had forgotten the specific feeling of being wanted for something, instead of being the person who hands over the device.
★★★★★
"I absolutely LOVE this!! My kids and I had fun making them. It's a fun project while bonding with my kids."
We sat on the floor and lined them up on a paper towel and he named every one of them. The tablet was on the table the entire time, face up, screen off. He did not ask for it again that afternoon.
What I checked before I let myself buy another one of these
Ages 3 and up, and my four-year-old handled it with help for the first two rounds
Under $40, which is less than I had already wasted on things that lasted one afternoon
The molds are reusable— you refill the powder and gels, so it is not a single-afternoon purchase
Everything stores in its own box, which mattered more than I expected, because clutter was half of why I hesitated
30-day money-back guarantee— fewer than 1% of buyers have ever claimed it
None of that is why it worked. It worked because it beat the screen in the first ten seconds. But those five things are what let me press buy without the familiar feeling that I was about to waste another forty dollars.
So was it just us?
That was my first thought the following week. I went and read what other parents had written, and skipped straight past the ones about how cute it is.
The thing that kept coming up was the same thing I could not believe about my own afternoon: how long kids stay with it.
★★★★★
"They played with it for well over an hour which is like 8 hours in kid time!"
★★★★★
"It's so entertaining for the kids. It kept my kids busy for two hours each day doing these amazing squishies."
★★★★★
"It has provided hours of fun for my 5 year old, and honestly I love making these myself and I'm almost 40!"
Other parents filmed their own afternoons with it.
★★★★★
His face lit up
"My son's face LIT UP when the shapes came to life."
★★★★★
My daughters are obsessed with it
"Perfect gift! My daughters are obsessed with it."
What I had backwards
I am not going to sit here and tell you a craft kit fixed my kid, because it did not, and I would stop reading if a stranger told me that. He still asks for the screen. Some days he still gets it.
What changed is that there is now something on the table that can win an afternoon on its own merits. That is all I ever actually needed. Not a rule. Not a war. An option that is more interesting than the thing I was losing to.
I spent six months trying to take something away. What worked was putting something down.
A lot of parents end up exactly where I was, and almost none of them say it out loud. They are working. The quiet is worth something. The guilt shows up later, usually around 9 p.m., usually alone. If any of that sounds familiar, it is not a character problem. It is a supply problem.
Paint and Bloom is currently running 60% off
The 20-piece kit is the one we have. Molds, gels, powder, net, gloves and the storage box are all in there, so there is nothing else to buy to get started.
30-day money-back guarantee. If your kid does not take to it, you send it back. Fewer than 1% of buyers ever have.
See the kit
The first one he ever made was green. It is dried out now, hard as a little bead, and it has been sitting on the windowsill since September. I am not throwing it away.