Rainy day rice

Thanks for all the great rainy day suggestions on the previous post! It's still raining cats and dogs here, so we are slowly working our way through all of your suggestions. The activity right now is Rainy Day Rice (we got this idea from the anonymous commenter who said "a big tupperware container of dried beans kept my son busy for hours when he was a preschooler. Just dump several bags of dried beans in the container, give them funnels, cups, bowls, whatever and let them have at it. I always spread a plastic tablecloth on the floor and told him to try and keep all the beans on the cloth." ) We didn't have any dried beans in the house, but we did have rice (we always have rice!) and some dried lentils that I've never had any success cooking. So that's what we used. I spread out a tablecloth, the girls grabbed a motley assortment of cups, funnels, and containers from the playroom, and I dumped out a big ole pile of dried rice and lentils. We're on hour two now, and they're not showing any signs of losing interest, so this activity gets two-thumbs up from me. PS: Is anyone else having trouble with Flickr turning your pictures red? These pictures look horribly reddish to me, and they looked fine before I uploaded them to Flickr. No time to fiddle with them, though, because Ro and Ree are trying out a Mini Hip Hop class and we've got to hop in the car. Update at 6:33pm: Well we're back from Mini Hip Hop class, which was a bust, and the girls are playing with their Rainy Day Rice again. They actually squealed "Ooooo, it's still here" when we walked back in the house. They didn't like the hip hop class at all, by the way, I think mostly because they didn't like the instructor, but I can't really tell. I asked if they wanted to try a different dance class with a different instructor, and they said "no," so I pressed it, and then Ree threw one of my quotes back at me: "Mama... you know how when you have a sippy cup that's a different color, the milk still tastes the same?" and I snorted with laughter. Yeah, yeah, I understand, baby girl. So no dance classes for us in the near future. (Oh, almost forgot to say who was who in the pics. Ree has on the chocolate-dipped strawberry outfit. She went shopping at the Crazy8 sale this past weekend and picked out all the stuff. And Ro is the one with her pants tucked in her socks, as usual.)