I LOVE your idea and can't wait to do the same with my grand daughter who is 2 years old now. I worked long hours while raising my three children alone and did a similar thing on much smaller scale with each of my three children - giving them each an hour or so alone with me each week. There things might be more activity than you would wish for but we have always loved the outdoors. My son had few interests and was the most difficult for me to connect with. Things he LOVED: flying a kite, roller skating, miniture golf, video games, rafting down a little fork of a nearby river that took us a number of weeks to build the raft from trashed lumber(bad time of year for you and I don't know where you live in Washington), BBQ breakfast on a tiny grill in the wilderness park (bacon on toast with hot cereal and fruit brought in a thermas was fast and easy then we would go hiking. I know you could take easy snacks without the trouble of the grill but he LOVED to eat hot food in the wide open spaces and it just tasted better there. Things he did not like but your grand son may: bicycle a along wetlands or beach or natural trail, walk thru a botanical garden, plant a tree (my carrotwood and palm trees were always dropping seedlings)in the countryside, scrapbooking, ceramics you mentioned, bought him a disposable camera and spent a day learning basis photography skills and taking pictures of family members, pets, friends, school or whatever he wished for a "My Life in 1974" (or whatever year it was), made a family tree collage from baby pictures of all the family members, built a bird house, bat house, visited the zoo, visited the farm that sells parrots, visited an ostrige farm, visited a llama farm, visited a turkey farm, had him write a story, and draw illistrations that I had bound into a book but now you can buy kits over Amazon.com for books you can have published and dishes they paint, send in and have made permanent. In fact, I have seen kits on Amazon.com to paint their own umberella, table lamp, cup, bird bath, bird feeder, bird house, etc. Also Home Depot or Lowes have kits for bird houses, bird feeders. I don't know if ANY of these ideas can work for you, but good look and I am sure you will get some GREAT suggestions. My girls LOVED to go for "high tea" where a friend of mine who owned a British tea house. (I was a nurse and massage/accupressurist and we would do trades). I do not know that your grandson would enjoy high tea. Also, the children LOVED to go to a really fancy restaurant (we could not afford to eat at) but on special occasions I would order each a Shirley Temple type of drink and we could overlook the harbor or bay to end a wonderful day. Oh, we use to drive to Disneyland and watch the grand finale fireworks in the Disneyland Hotel sipping a juice or milk. I don't know if you have anything in your area that you can get a "piece of".

@ livebetter No, I'm not a chemist * LOL * In fact, one of my worst teachers in high school was a chemistry teacher. From my limited knowledge, silicates are generally included in detergents as "washer protection agents" or "anti corrosion agents". Perhaps some detergents are more aggressive and require this ingredient while others do not, I don't know. I purchased a laundry soap made specifically for conditioned water that contains as it's 2nd or 3rd ingredient sodium metasilicate, which is a corrosion inhibitor. Softened water is notoriously aggressive against metals. The salts in conditioned water corrode the anodes in hot water heaters pretty readily. Soft water can also do a good job leaching copper out of copper water pipes, sometimes causing "blue water" to come out of peoples' taps. This sometimes happens in newer homes, but the corrosion will eventually form a coating on the inside of copper pipes that acts as an insulator against the corrosion. Did you know that the name PERSIL comes from the two primary ingredients in its original formulation? The PER comes from PERborate and the SIL comes from SILicates.

LOL...yes, I have plenty of base now, thanks to our "little birdy"! You'll be glad to know that my poor car is 100 pounds lighter now. =) So if not the cameo look, what're you looking for? Dark dragonfly on light background? Try your tie-dye design...I bet that would look pretty cool. Additives maybe? Sorry, I'm terribly uncreative so not much help there. Andrea

it shouldn't matter how a different tablecloth washed--- that's irrelevant unless the table cloth was exactly the same. some cottons require cold water washes to minimize bleeding... you say that the care label on the one that bled says 'something along the lines of machine wash in warm water'... maybe it was mislabeled... but since you can't go to a store and show them the product and the incorrect label, you don't have a receipt, and that the tablecloth is a few years old already, i think a 15% off coupon is a nice gesture... there is SO much fraud and theft, etc that goes on in retail that I'm sure that it is diifficult for many stores!! i recently had an issue where a glass in a set from ws (on line) arrived broken... they sent ups to pick it up and sent another set-- again, there was an issue with another glass and i contacted them, the set was again picked up and they set a 3rd set- finally i got an undamaged set! even tho it was a pain, i was pleased with their prompt pick up and sending of new sets-- and it was a small pain compared to having to pack up and bring something back to the store!