Happy fun ball kids' toy!

[karrie]

Happy FUN BALL!


-only $14.95-

• Warning: Pregnant women, the elderly and children under 10 should avoid prolonged exposure to Happy Fun Ball.
• Caution: Happy Fun Ball may suddenly accelerate to dangerous speeds.
• Happy Fun Ball Contains a liquid core, which, if exposed due to rupture, should not be touched, inhaled, or looked at.
• Do not use Happy Fun Ball on concrete.

Discontinue use of Happy Fun Ball if any of the following occurs:

• Itching
• Vertigo
• Dizziness
• Tingling in extremities
• Loss of balance or coordination
• Slurred speech
• Temporary blindness
• Profuse sweating
• Heart palpitations

If Happy Fun Ball begins to smoke, get away immediately. Seek shelter and cover head.


Happy Fun Ball may stick to certain types of skin.

When not in use, Happy Fun Ball should be returned to its special container and kept under refrigeration...

Failure to do so relieves the makers of Happy Fun Ball, Wacky Products Incorporated, and its parent company Global Chemical Unlimited, of any and all liability.

Ingredients of Happy Fun Ball include an unknown glowing substance which fell to Earth, presumably from outer space.

Happy Fun Ball has been shipped to our troops in Saudi Arabia and is also being dropped by our warplanes on Iraq.

Do not taunt Happy Fun Ball.

Happy Fun Ball comes with a lifetime guarantee.

Happy Fun Ball ACCEPT NO SUBSTITUTES!

 

[karrie]

I guess I should elaborate a bit as to why I posted this.

I was shopping for a birthday gift for a friend's little boy, turning five, yesterday. My kids picked out a package of 'Floam' at Wal-Mart. I turned the package over, to read that the product can cause severe irritation if it contacts eyes, and should not come into contact with fabrics. So, the kids were told to put it back, and had to pick out different toys for their friend.

When I bumped into the mom later, I nudged her aside to chat away from little ears, and explained what the kids had wanted to get. She assured me that she in fact has a few tubs of this product, and keeps the kids at the table with it, and they thoroughly enjoy it... she is considering replacing all of her playdough with this product they like it so much.

Hmmmm.

So, I decided to research it a little bit. I bumped across this article in my searches, and it gave me a good chuckle, since this is the eye with which I've essentially been viewing this product. How many chemicals are in it? Which chemicals? What is its toxicity?

I hate that toys are capable of causing a mom so much paranoia!

 

[eh1eh]

Quite a number of those symptoms remind me of an episode involving Lemon Gin. The memory of the shame rushes back.:confused2:

BTW I wouldn't get that floam crap either. Bet it sticks to the carpet when dry.

 

[AmberEyes]

Whatever happened to safe activities like making crafts with macaroni and colouring on the walls with markers?

Crazy toys... we were too poor to have those.. so we had fun with other, cheaper toys... like markers ^.^

 

[eh1eh]

Whatever happened to safe activities like making crafts with macaroni and colouring on the walls with markers?

Crazy toys... we were too poor to have those.. so we had fun with other, cheaper toys... like markers ^.^

Ya, well we were so poor I had to draw on the walls with crayons. No fancy markers when I was a :toothy5: kid.

 

[hermanntrude]

I had a collection of 311 marbles which i was incredibly proud of. me and my dad made a huge number of games up to play with them. We had one games which involved a long rectangle of string and dividing the marbles up by their colouring, so the white ones with a stripe through were americans, and the blue shiny ones were the brits and the earthenware ones were the japs, and so on. There weren't very many brits, but we kept those in our hand while spreading the rest randomly around inside the string, then we used the brits to try and flick the germans and the japs out of the string enclosure. The idea was that we had to keep the brits in play or we'd lose to the germans. There were more rules but i dont remember them very well... we used the big marbles as well, which we called bonkers, and we could drop them into the area as if they were a bomb.

We also used to make roly-polies, which were runs for the marbles to go down. Usually they were made from two parrallel strips of wire soldered to a frame. some of them were four feet high and incorporated curly wurlies (spiral tracks) see-saws, and a variety of other tricks we tried to invent.

One day when I came to see my dad he told me i was too old for this sort of thing and we never did anything except talk ever since.

 

[hermanntrude]

Ya, well we were so poor I had to draw on the walls with crayons. No fancy markers when I was a :toothy5: kid.

I was so poor i had to draw on the walls with stones

 

[karrie]

Quite a number of those symptoms remind me of an episode involving Lemon Gin. The memory of the shame rushes back.:confused2:

BTW I wouldn't get that floam crap either. Bet it sticks to the carpet when dry.

actually, it turns out I've made this stuff before, minus the polystyrene beads... you'd probably know it as 'slime' from when you were a kid, or would know some kid who's made or played with it. It's a simple thing to make. Water, PVA, boric acid, and food coloring. Add the polystyrene beads and you've got FLOAM! Yeah, it's not something you want in your carpet, but then neither is playdough, or worse still, sillyputty.

 

[eh1eh]

Oh ya I've scraped off playdough before.
BTW what's PVA?:wave:

 

[karrie]

Whatever happened to safe activities like making crafts with macaroni and colouring on the walls with markers?

Crazy toys... we were too poor to have those.. so we had fun with other, cheaper toys... like markers ^.^

It turns out that this floam stuff is about as safe as macaroni crafts... perhaps a bit messier though when you factor in having to work with polystyrene beads if you choose to make it yourself (so popular in pillows and stuffed toys right now, you can probably find them on clearance at wallyworld for a buck or two). Everything but the beads is stuff I've got around the house, and I could mix up a batch for the kids while they're off school this week. I think I'm probably going to give it a go.

 

[selfactivated]

For us fun was baking cookies LOL no wonder Im a tub. My sis used to cut my barbies hair and burn their heads.......can you say anger management. I learned books were my best form of entertainment very early in life.

 

[karrie]

Oh ya I've scraped off playdough before.
BTW what's PVA?:wave:

polyvinyl acetate.... glue! you can use pure pva, or a dilute pva glue like elmers.

 

[karrie]

For us fun was baking cookies LOL no wonder Im a tub. My sis used to cut my barbies hair and burn their heads.......can you say anger management. I learned books were my best form of entertainment very early in life.

My sister burned one of her barbie's hair trying to curl it, and decided it was okay, because she'd look better as a black girl anyway... she melted all the hair into little blobs on her head, and got out the brown marker... it was quite hilarious, but probably would have terribly offended any actual black people. Not surprisingly though, there was no one in our town back then who was black.

 

[hermanntrude]

polyvinyl acetate.... glue! you can use pure pva, or a dilute pva glue like elmers.

i think it's poly vinyl alcohol, although poly vinyl acetate also exists.... and it'd have the same acronym.... hmmm

 

[eh1eh]

i think it's poly vinyl alcohol, although poly vinyl acetate also exists.... and it'd have the same acronym.... hmmm

I see, it's because it's 'white glue' we need the acro. LOL

 

[hermanntrude]

I did the slime thing at my wife's school in england. Gave each kid a baggie with dyed PVA solution (stolen from work) and went around adding borax (a boric acid salt) to it. Then each kid gets to squish the stuff together and feel it cross-linking into a slime. They were amazed by it.

 

[karrie]

i think it's poly vinyl alcohol, although poly vinyl acetate also exists.... and it'd have the same acronym.... hmmm

I had both acetate and alcohol in my mind when I replied... so I typed in a quick web search, and got this.... http://www.thistothat.com/glue/pva.shtml ..... doesn't mean it's right though, but, I at least TRIED to check to make sure I wasn't talking out of my ____.

 

[karrie]

I did the slime thing at my wife's school in england. Gave each kid a baggie with dyed PVA solution (stolen from work) and went around adding borax (a boric acid salt) to it. Then each kid gets to squish the stuff together and feel it cross-linking into a slime. They were amazed by it.

I have all the stuff on hand, and a son who's a scientist at heart (he FREAKS when he gets to do experiments), so I figure it's a great activity to try. Whether or not it's a safe product for children is a matter for much debate on the net though. Boric acid and PVA are both chemicals, both capable of being toxic in large quantities, both capable of irritating skin.

But, I don't want to screw my kids out of a fun afternoon because the world is paranoid. lol.

 

[hermanntrude]

I had to investigate the safety issues before i did this, as it was required by the school and my university. The MSDS documents show PVA is totally safe, even being edible, although not very nice. Borax however is mildly toxic (btw i dont know about boric acid... that's a different species, slightly and may have different properties), and i figured at the time that to hurt anyone they'd need to eat about 5g borax, minimum, 50g to kill them. It doesnt look tasty and it smells pretty bad, and it probably doesnt taste nice either. But i dyed the PVA blue to make it seem less edible, and made sure the kids knew it wasnt good to eat.

In addition, once the reaction is finished the borax isnt available as a free agent, it's part of the structure of the polymer. A crosslinker.

In additional addition, both the PVA and the borax are used in solution, which dilutes the properties and reduces any chance of irritation exponentially

this much research was enough for the insurance people.

 

[karrie]

I had to investigate the safety issues before i did this, as it was required by the school and my university. The MSDS documents show PVA is totally safe, even being edible, although not very nice. Borax however is mildly toxic (btw i dont know about boric acid... that's a different species, slightly and may have different properties), and i figured at the time that to hurt anyone they'd need to eat about 5g borax, minimum, 50g to kill them. It doesnt look tasty and it smells pretty bad, and it probably doesnt taste nice either. But i dyed the PVA blue to make it seem less edible, and made sure the kids knew it wasnt good to eat.

In addition, once the reaction is finished the borax isnt available as a free agent, it's part of the structure of the polymer. A crosslinker.

In additional addition, both the PVA and the borax are used in solution, which dilutes the properties and reduces any chance of irritation exponentially

this much research was enough for the insurance people.

Yeah, borax is what we have on hand... I've just always heard it called boric acid. I had researched it when I bought it, because it's a laundry agent and my kids have skin issues, so I wanted to see if it was safe, and I was also using it as ant bait in the yard, suspended in corn syrup. Having pets and kids around, using it in corn syrup, the proportions I was using they'd need to eat close to a full 250g of the mixture to become sick, and the animals would need to eat roughly half of that. Since I was only ever putting it out in roughly 2Tbs at a time, I figured I was pretty safe. And the PVA seems pretty straight forward to me... they're gonna be coming into contact with it at school anyhow.