Update: From Glue to Stressed Balls

The water beads came in the mail on Tuesday. The description on Amazon assured me I could make two whole gallons of water beads. What arrived was a tiny ziplock bag full of balls approximately the size of a pin head. I can't tell you how happy I was to see they were called Stress Balls.

Stress balls.

The instructions noted that a single teaspoon of balls would yield a quart of filled water beads. So, I did the math. My fancy Voss bottles hold 11.5 ounces of water, and a quart is 32 ounces, so I needed to put enough beads to fill a third of a teaspoon. Easy.

Except, a 1/3 of a teaspoon of beads was only, like, 10 tiny balls (or so it seemed to my giant eyeballs eyeing that giant Voss bottle). Surely, I needed to put more into the bottle. So, I upped the amount  to 1/2 a teaspoon, and when that looked like it wasn't enough, I put in another 1/2 a teaspoon. Then I added water and the kids gathered around the bottle to watch the beads do their thing.

The instructions said it would take 6-8 hours for the beads to fully hydrate, so after checking them at bedtime, I promptly forgot about them. The next morning, Pink came dashing in to see how they looked. They LOOKED cool, but no matter how much she shook the bottle, they didn't budge.

Obviously, there were too many balls in the bottle. I took off the lid and about ten beads came shooting out onto the floor. After I dumped some more into a plastic bag for Stow to squeeze, I added more water. When all were sufficiently satisfied with the way the balls moved, I super glued the lid on.

Hours later, when I got home from work, the balls were crammed together and stuck in place again. That's when I realized that my morning intervention had only provided enough space for the balls to keep growing. So, I pried off the lid and dumped out another 1/3 of the bottle, putting the newly freed balls into the plastic bag with the others.

I added more water and glued the lid, leaving us with this.

Finally.

Oh, and a ziplock bag full of smashed stress balls. In the trash can.

I guess the moral of this story is that I should probably just follow directions and trust my math. Sigh.