Moon Sand Mess -- Pardon Me While I Vent

My boys love Moon Sand. I'm not Moon Sand's biggest fan, but I'm willing to accept the risk for the sake of happy kids who are exercising their creative muscles and (above all) are sitting still being good. I suggested to Grammy Vollmer that Timmy receive a Moon Sand play set for Christmas and she came through for us with the Neighborhood Playset. That along with some other containers of Moon Sand we had, and we have enough Moon Sand to even entertain friends who come over to play (which we did a couple weeks ago!).

(By the way, the picture of the neat, clean red and blue Moon Sand siding on the house on the product mentioned above is some sort of pipe dream -- Timmy loves "painting" the house, but it would never look that nice.)

Hit the link above, check out the customer reviews about it. I feel both ways -- I'm thrilled that my boys enjoy it so much, but it is indeed a bear to clean up. And even after the visible sand is cleaned up, if you walk around my kitchen barefoot for a couple days afterwards, you still feel the grit that my vacuum, dustbuster, broom and sponge didn't quite get up. Again, an acceptable risk for the sake of happy kids, I guess.

There's apparently this inflatble play box thing for Moon Sand. Tempting. I wonder how well it would actually work, say on our back porch or something.

So this afternoon the boys spent 45 minutes or so with Moon Sand, and even though the boys make a good effort, there's still a colossal mess on my kitchen floor when they're done. And since sweeping up the stuff on the floor brings along dog hair, grated parmesean cheese, crushed Cheerios and the like, there's no way I'm putting Floor Moon Sand back in with the clean stuff. So I'd estimate a 5-7% loss of product with every play session.

I'm also a tyrant about keeping the colors separated. I know, I know, I'm probably hampering their creativity somewhat, and it's contrary to the commericals and pictures on the packages of Moon Sand of colors, colors everywhere, but they just don't mix nicely.

Before:

From 2008 01 14 Mo...

After:

From 2008 01 14 Mo...