Childhood memories. More difficult then remembered.

It’s a natural instinct to want your children to enjoy the activities you did as a kid right? Sure some people take it too far and force the pursuit of their lost dreams upon their offspring. Not so cool, our failures are ours, leave them alone or correct them. That being said; I see no problem in pushing our children toward goals & activities we remember being good or hold dear. As a rational adult, if you think it’s a good idea it must be.

Some things that I remember being easy as a child are in fact more difficult for an adult to master or accomplish, I suppose we could attribute it to failing mental plasticity, or the tendency of adult paradigms to complicate things. It begs the question though : how can encasing someone in carbonite be so difficult? Sure, Jabba had a giant room full of equipment and a cavernous chamber but we had a huge sandbox and plenty of H2O.

I spent hours and days perfecting this art as a child, it’s a fairly simple process: Make a sand and water slushie – dribble it all over any Star Wars figure (no need to limit it to Solo) resulting in a mummified – in fact: carbonized in sand, carbonite figure.

The problem is that achieving the perfect consistency IS HARD, you need it to be thick to completely encase the figure while remain thin enough to adhere tenaciously to the contours. I spent a few hours teaching my son this last weekend and getting that perfect viscosity of muck proved more difficult then I imagined. I finally got a very good system engineered involving a small funnel, of course water, sand and some sticks to help push the slurry through the spout.

Needless to say, my son loved it, we had a morning of fun in the sun, there were a few lessons learned about states of matter along the way. Did I over complicate the process? Quite possibly. I did however learn a thing or two about patience and diligence from a toddler.

Thanks kid.