HE SLIMED ME

My son's obsession with his gooey creations has been my undoing

- Olivia Stren

"I HAVE AN IDEA!" my son, Leo, said to me about a year ago, with a wild look in his eyes. "Let's make rainbow slime!" It was not yet 8 a.m., and I was hard-pressed to think of anything I wanted to do less.

"Maybe later," I offered my then-four-year-old, avoiding the more flammable answer that sprang to mind (i.e., "No").

"But I neeeeeed to make something!" he pleaded, as if he were Monet, had just beheld a water lily for the first time, and here I was denying him oils and a canvas.

At the time, Leo was six months into his obsession with slime: we’d made fluffy slime, galaxy slime, clearglue slime and retro Ghostbusters slime-kit slime. For the (blissfully) uninitiated, slime is a squishy, goolike substance made from the viscous marriage of polyvinyl acetate glue, food colouring and some kind of ‘activator’—saline solution, laundry detergent, liquid starch—whose chemical makeup transforms all the other ingredients into a slippery, malleable glob. If those ingredients are non-negotiable, others (glitter, googly eyes, gummy bears) can be tossed in for a certain textural or aesthetic je ne sais quoi.