Poop stains make a great science project! But SHE said No!

So my daughter is 9yrs old and so cool, I mean she thinks she is and I’m happy she thinks so.  Me on the other hand, I am sooo embarrassing.  It’s no surprise that when I come up with all these science project ideas that involve cloth diapers…yeah she doesn’t go for it.  In fact, if I mention cloth diapers at all she rolls her eyes and says “Mommmmmm!”

I had some good ideas too!  Testing absorbency of diapers, fabrics, cloth vs. disposable, sunning poop stains (I kind of knew she’d reject that one).  No matter what I came up with she said “No!”

Then it dawned on me, we could do a project about sunning cloth diapers, I could share the results with my readers and we don’t HAVE to use cloth diapers or poop stains.  Thank goodness, because cloth diapers are SO embarrassing and NOT cool. lol

So, we used white terry cloth and we picked out three man-made products and three organic products to use for our stains.

• Pink Special Effects hair dye (seen here)
• Axle Grease
• Sharpie Marker
• Chocolate Syrup
• Strawberries
• Tomato Sauce

I won’t bore you with our hypothesis, procedure and all that junk.  The goal was to test stains under the power of the sun’s ultraviolet rays and see which were removed faster if at all.

The verdict, strawberry, chocolate syrup and tomato sauce came out almost completely after two days.  Axle grease, probably never will.  Sharpie did lighten a bit but that’s it, and the Pink Special Effects hair dye lightened quite a bit, more than I expected.

This is the story about how I manage to get my daughter to do a science project that I could relate the results to cloth diapering.  Ultimately we discovered and were able to prove what I already knew, that the sun has powerful natural bleaching abilities that work great on natural and organic stains.

So, shhhh.  Don’t tell my daughter.  Next year, I may have to get a little more creative.

What kinds of Science Projects are YOU working on?  (Because we ALL know that it’s the parents that end up doing most of the work.)