Brianna Walker

We live on a farm. At the end of the day, we all smell like dirt — or mud and manure, as this spring hasn’t quite seemed to make up its mind if there should be snow or sunshine.

This has tripled the laundry and doubled the baths — a situation my 6-year-old hasn’t been thrilled about. I think he’s afraid that the adventure memories might wash down the drain with the mud! It also means we have gone through more soap than normal. So when we began studying soap in chemistry class, I may have gotten a little more excited than the kids.

We read about soap throughout history — learning that Queen Elizabeth I reportedly took a bath every four weeks “whether it was necessary or not.” My 6-year-old thought that she must have been a very intelligent queen.

We read about soap legends. According to the Roman tale, soap got its name from Mount Sapo, where animals were sacrificed. Rain would wash the fat from the sacrificed animals along with alkaline wooden ashes from the sacrificial fires into the Tiber River, where people found the mixture helped to clean clothes.

And finally we began reading about the chemistry of soap — saponification, during which an ester reacts with an inorganic base to produce alcohol and soap. When triglycerides react with sodium hydroxide (NaOH), it produces glycerol and fatty acid salt.

“Soap is basically a salt product that is made by combining an alkali with fats,” I exclaim. The more excited I got over the chemical equations, the more my kids’ eyes glazed over. “What do you call someone who mixes H20 and NaOH?” I asked. “A lyer!” I laughed. They didn’t.

That’s when I decided it was time we had some good, clean fun. Our kitchen counters soon looked like an herbal apothecary. Bottles of oils and tubs of fats lined the counters, along with containers holding last year’s dried herbs, blossoms and berries.

We made a hyssop-shea butter blend, then an aloe-oatmeal variety. One of the goats had kidded recently, so we threw in a few batches of goatmilk soap. Coffee soap, tea soap, calendula and lilac — soon the kitchen was filled with hundreds of bars of soap in various stages of curing.

My husband teased that I was becoming addicted to making soap. What soap is to the body, laughter is to the soul, so I agreed that yes, while I may have started down the slippery “soap” of addiction, I assured him I was clean now!

He rolled his eyes and asked why, with all this soap, we still had the dirtiest kids in the neighborhood?

I smirked. “They’re farm kids. That isn’t dirt, it’s potential income.”

I’ve heard you need two baths a day to stay really clean, one a day to be passably clean, and just one a week to avoid becoming a public menace. So to keep from menacing society — during this terribly muddy spring, we decided our kitchen science experiments weren’t quite complete yet. We took out baking soda, citric acid and cornstarch.

What kind of chemical reactions would occur when sodium bicarbonate dissolves in water along with citric acid? As the baking soda dissolves, positively charged sodium breaks apart from the negatively charged bicarbonate. As the citric acid dissolves, a single hydrogen ion separates from the rest of the molecule. Very quickly the hydrogen and bicarbonate mingle and begin undergoing a series of reactions, creating carbon dioxide. Because carbon dioxide is a gas, it forms small bubbles in the water — we had just created bath bombs.

Bath bombs turned out to be just like the soap. We couldn’t seem to stop with one batch. We tried substituting other ingredients while still looking for things that would make that fizzing reaction. We tried several items with moderate success, including Crystal Light packets and cream of tartar. But the best reaction came from citric acid. Quite quickly, dozens of recipes of bath bombs replaced the bars of soap that lined our counters.

The school year is wrapping up, and then our mad scientist projects will take a back burner to harvest. I don’t know what kind of season we’ll have or what kind of dirt we’ll encounter, but I’m confident we’ll have enough soap (hope) to get through it!