Family Man: She Blinded Me With Science

I’m holding baby Ari while finishing dinner as Benjamin, 7, and Jacob, 3, run around the house, inflicting pain on each other, when my wife calls out, “Science experiments!”

Immediately, the little demolition men trample to the kitchen table, where what’s left of my enchiladas is whisked away in favor of a tall glass and a bottle of cooking oil.

“Tonight, we’re going to see what happens when oil and water mix,” Wendy announces like some kind of feminine (and infinitely more attractive) refugee from Beakman’s World.

“I want to pour the oil,” little Jacob says as he climbs on top of the Formica tabletop.

“I want to add food coloring!” Benjamin chimes in.

“Wait a minute, nothing toxic is going to happen here, is it?” I say, only half kidding.

Actually, the whole scene is anything but toxic as Wendy leads us on a chemistry journey to watch oil and water separate and food colors blend to form different hues. Being scientifically curious plays well for my wife, in her work as a professor of early childhood education, and as a mom trying to entertain a houseful of boys.

As someone whose own mother taught him not to play with chemicals because the wrong mix of rubbing alcohol and baby powder could melt off a limb, I have to wonder why my wife thinks science is so much fun. When did moms go from, “Don’t play with those chemicals, they might hurt you” to “Let’s blow something up?”

I don’t know, but, certainly, my children’s personal Marie Curie has wowed them with such tricks as a clay volcano that erupts from a concoction of vinegar and baking soda and the ever-amazing hard-boiled-egg-in-a-bottle trick. She’s taught the boys botany with plants around the garden and read them books on everything from geology to zoology.

But she’s not the only source of chemical-physical-biological fun. By now, Benjamin has attended half a dozen birthday parties headlined by the Mad Science® company. At these functions, various nutty-professor types perform experiments that entertain young children and send them home with their own dish of green slime (that sits on a shelf until your toddler opens it and turns your kitchen floor chartreuse).

And that’s not all! At school, Benjamin learned how mealworms turn into darkling beetles and, at camp, he built a battery-powered vehicle from scratch. For Jacob, he tested how long he could sit on his baby brother before Daddy noticed Ari was turning purple. In less sadistic situations,

Jacob has spent hours in an empty bathtub – with his clothes on – performing water displacement experiments.