Miracle Bubbles

I don't know about most of you out there, but May has always been one of my favourite months of the year. There's just something about the month of May that makes me smile.

For starters, the anniversary date of this blog is in May. I began this blog on May 24, 2011, and I never expected to still be writing in this blog nearly two years later. I must say that I'm quite proud of that achievement myself!

May also happens to be the month of this blogger's birth as well, and as I inch ever so closer to the number 32, I'll likely have some retrospective thoughts to pen inside this blog.

May also marks the beginning of warmer weather, blooming flowers, and budding trees. On one hand, it will be fantastic to wear shorts and polo shirts again after the winter that never seemed to end. But, on the other hand, with my severe allergy to tree pollen, I will be popping allergy pills the same way most people would pop candy out of their Pez dispensers.

But, hey, you take the good, you take the bad, you take them all, and then you have...

...oh...sorry. Really bad retro-80s flashback there.

I have a feeling that May 2013 will be one of my best months yet. I've already made a couple of big commitments for my future, I'm doing some things that I have never done before, and I'm coming up with ideas to mark the second anniversary of this blog. I haven't come up with much. Maybe I need your help to mark the two year anniversary of this blog in a big way. I'll get back to you with that.

For now, let's talk about today's blog topic...a real spring/summer activity that I loved to do as a kid, and one that cost only pennies a use!

(Or, in 2013 prices, three dollars a bottle.)

Or, if you really wanted to save money, you could get the same effect by using a bottle of dish soap mixed with a little bit of water.

Today, we're going to be talking about bubbles. Miracle Bubbles, as we call them in Canada.  I suppose that they could be known as that in the United States as well, but I'm not one hundred per cent sure, and I don't want to report inaccuracies in this blog.

Seriously, how many people have had fun blowing bubbles in a field or a park? There's just something whimsical over seeing bubbles blowing in the wind, and landing on the grass, taking just a few minutes to pop. All of a sudden, my childhood memories come flooding back to me!

Truth be told, Miracle Bubbles were a huge part of my childhood. Every Easter Sunday, along with my basket of Cadbury Mini Eggs and Reese Peanut Butter Eggs, I would almost always get a bottle of Miracle Bubbles to play with...

...outside.

I was forbidden to blow bubbles inside of the house. Let's just say that there was one incident in which I was blowing bubbles at the top of the stairs of my house and was being a little bit careless in the process. Let's just say that I knocked over the entire bottle of Miracle Bubbles, and the soapy, slippery solution poured down the whole staircase, turning our stairs into a bumpy Slip and Slide.

In other words, I was the only person in my family who could make stairs more dangerous.

After that incident, I was always banished to our backyard to blow bubbles. Not that I minded though. Watching the bubbles blowing around in the wind was a great sight to behold. I know that this is going to sound very strange, but I had a rather vivid imagination as a child, and I would often imagine myself being trapped inside one of those bubbles. Looking back on it, I think it was a nice memory to have...just picturing myself flying through the world in my own personal bubble, seeing things that other people could not, enjoying the scenery as well as the unpredictability of not knowing where the bubble would take me next. I guess there's just something sort of magical about that memory. In many ways, I sort of still have that dream of flying through the sky in a bubble, forgetting all of my cares and worries and just letting the bubble take me where it was meant to.

Okay, I just went off on a tangent here. But then again, if you've read this blog before, you probably know that this is a recurring theme.

Now, I have a question for all of you. How did you blow your bubbles?

The truth is that there are a bunch of ways in which you could blow bubbles, and all of them worked in varying degrees.

Obviously the most common way to blow bubbles is with a plastic wand, similar to the one seen above. And, wands are probably the most versatile instrument to use when it comes to the art of blowing the perfect bubble. You could blow into it slowly or quickly to get varying sizes of bubbles. Blowing on the wand quickly would cause you to blow a series of tiny bubbles through the air, and blowing on it slowly would allow you to blow one gigantic bubble. It could be an interesting game, to try and blow the largest bubble possible without it bursting.

But of course, wands weren't the only thing one could use to blow bubbles. If you poured enough of the Miracle Bubble solution in a bowl, or mixed up your own, you could dip a coat hanger inside the solution and make bubbles that way. I've even seen people making bubbles with various household objects. Really, any piece of equipment made of either plastic or metal with at least one hole in the middle of it would work just fine.

I've even seen bubble guns being manufactured and sold in stores. I never owned one, but you could use the gun to blow an endless supply of bubbles. Come to think of it, bubble guns didn't exist back when I was a kid, and I am almost sorry that I was born too early to get my hands on one. I would almost be tempted to buy a bubble gun for myself...if I didn't mind people giving me peculiar looks at the checkout counters.

(Ah well...there's always self-checkouts. Nobody would have to know.)

At any rate, that's my brief blog entry on Miracle Bubbles. Now, I want to hear from you.

What are some of your bubble making memories? I'd love to hear them!