There's no end to the fun...

... you can have with a little food coloring, some water, and a squirt bottle. This is what Ellie and Mommy did yesterday morning for about an hour...



And no, there wasn't a massacre. Just a lot of food coloring mixed with a lot of snow. Ellie thought it was great. Until her water bottle ran out of squirt. Then...



"More please. Water empty."

And indeed, it was.



So I'd refill it and she'd go out and empty it on the deck again. We went through this about a dozen times. She thought it was great. So did I.

She did a few other things, too, like filling a bucket with colorful snow, dumping it out, and stomping on the resultant snow castle. She also watered the compost buckets for us. And I heard myself saying, as I watched my daughter head toward the compost bucket with a shovel in her hand, "No no, Honey, we don't play in the compost." Those sure weren't the words I was thinking when I imagined all the the things I'd say to my daughter one day. Oh well.