Plaster Mold FAIL (sort of)

So everyone keeps telling me to treasure this time because my son will grow up so fast. They tell me how much bigger their children are at three months, six months, one year, six years, sixteen years... and remind me to appreciate this time as much as I can. Of course, that's hard to do when I'm barely conscious from lack of sleep half the time! However, I want to take their advice to heart, and I've been photographing him and trying to enjoy his tiny-ness as much as possible. And since he's really too young to "play" with right now, I decided to do some playing of my own to preserve his small features.

After browsing through Amazon.com offers of clay handprint and footprint sets, I decided I didn't want to wait and drove out to Hobby Lobby to pick up a kit... or two, or three... or four. Okay, so I couldn't decide. I picked out two plaster-of-Paris kits for making hand- and footprints, one "party pack" that makes 10 clay hand/footprint ornaments (which is perfect for a party of kids, or a bunch of Christmas gifts!), and one kit that creates a 3-D plaster mold of his hand and foot. Overboard? Nah!

With his hands and feet growing so quickly and the complexity of the 3-D kit, I decided to do that one first and enlisted (read: arm-twisted) Darrell to help out. First step: read all the instructions. The package talks about how "easy" the process is, but it actually involves a lot of steps and a lot of careful reading. (I like how it suggests doing this project when your child is in a "good mood." Defining a newborn's "good mood" is pretty straightforward: he's either eating or sleeping - which means pray he doesn't wake up when you dip his hand into the gooey mold.)

You first have to mix water and the molding powder for one minute. Of course, we didn't read the words "one minute" until it was already about one minute, and we used lukewarm water instead of cold water, so the mold was setting before we could get it into the cup where we would plunge his hand. We tried adding water to it, but it was too late: the jello-like mold was too congealed. Fail.

Enter hormones. When all you do, day in and day out, is feed and comfort a newborn and try to get a nap, little things like making plaster molds of tiny limbs take on a great importance. This project was actually the only important thing to me to get done Saturday. So when step one failed, I naturally started crying, which only (fair enough) frustrated my husband. Fortunately, I thought to stop crying and get online before 9pm to call Michael's (which closes at 9pm) and find out that they had a kit available. My ever-so-patient husband offered to drive us over there at 8:45pm to pick up another kit for another try at this molding business.

Attempt number two went better - sort of. This time we read the instructions more carefully - this kit's molding substance only required 20 seconds of mixing before we had to stick little D's hand in it and we got it poured into the styrofoam cup before it started setting - but little D wasn't as conked out as he was an hour before when we started this business. Almost immediately after we plunged his tiny fist into the pinkish molding goo, like the flip of a light switch, he woke up and began screaming. We had to hold his hand in there for a good 2-3 minutes while he twisted, squirmed and screamed as though we were torturing our precious child on the rack. Keeping the icky mix off his blanket, the table and us was as challenging as holding his hand in the cup for what seemed an eternity.

When we finally pulled his hand out, he was clenching bits of the mix in his palm, so I figured the mold was ruined. Meanwhile, I felt like a horrible parent. He was screaming bloody murder and his arm had bits of the (nontoxic) mix all over it, so I needed to give him a quick bath (which I'd planned to do anyway). That just made matters worse. As I set him in the mini tub in the kitchen sink, he screamed like there was no tomorrow, and I nearly started crying with guilt. The poor kid was scared to death (and probably cold to boot). My mom said it was no different than his screaming when we changed a diaper, but I felt this was different because I was causing him fear for my own silly art project. After bathing, towel-wrapping, holding, soothing and rocking him to sleep, I had to decide whether we'd attempt the foot or not. I still felt guilty, but I had insisted on going out at 9pm on a Saturday to get the damn kit, so we might as well finish the job.

Attempt number three: total failure. Darrell mixed the pink goo, poured it into a tiny bread pan and we dipped in his foot... but there was no way in hell we were holding it there. His leg muscles are much stronger than his arm muscles, and he kicked and squirmed enough that even the two of us together couldn't keep his foot down and even halfway immobilized enough for the mold to set. We had to toss the pan and mold and accept defeat. For once, however, my husband was more optimistic than I was and figured we might as well pour the plaster into the hand mold and see what happens. I had little expectation that it would turn out, but I was grateful he was trying to make it work when I was the one who had thrown the hissy fit over doing it in the first place.

Turns out it DID work! The hand isn't perfect, but it looks pretty damn good to me :) And good enough that I may consider trying to do a better hand and trying for his foot again next weekend...

Darrell's hand mold