Remember getting down and dirty with Elmer’s glue and borax? Every week I would take the trip to the grocery store with my mom just so I could run ahead to aisle eight where the school supplies were. Any Elmer’s glue that was left automatically got tossed in the shopping cart, because no matter how many batches of slime I had already made that week, it simply wasn’t enough.

The gooey substance took off as a trend back in 2016, and has stuck with us ever since. But, unlike kids today who can just go to the store and find any texture or color of slime under the sun, we OGs had to actually make our own sticky creations. Remembering my time as a master slime maker, I wanted to see if I still had the skills to make some killer slime. 

The first job I had was to get the glue and food coloring from the store. After stocking up on Elmer’s glue and getting some weird looks during check out, I headed home to hunt through nearly every cabinet for some borax. I finally found it tucked in the laundry room behind a layer of dust. Now it was time for the fun part. After about 20 minutes of heading down memory lane and making a complete and utter mess, my creation was complete:

I was so proud of the gooey goodness I had made, that I refused to let my astounding efforts go unnoticed. I wanted to let my friends play with it, but I was also curious to see if I could bring a sense of nostalgia back for NVOT students, having them reminisce on their middle school days of borax, food coloring, and beads (if you were fancy with it). 

The overall response I got was universal: they loved it! You could see their eyes light up and then the wheels in their brain start to turn as everyone reminisced on one of the biggest 2010s fads. 

For senior Olivia Cataldo, playing with the slime brought back the days when she “turned [her] kitchen counter into a slime factory.” She continued, “Playing with the slime brought back memories of spending hours just trying to get the perfect consistency and then bringing it to school to boast to my friends.” 

Junior Andrew Park remembers “messing around with the slime when his friends would bring it into school.” He added, “It’s a trend that I personally didn’t partake in, but it for sure brought back some middle school memories for me.”

I knew the color was pretty, but who knew students could have so much fun with slime in class? Now that the slime hype has simmered (it lasted a solid 2 periods), the borax has now made its way back to its rightful place on the shelf. My slime days are clearly in the past, mostly because my mom said that she doesn’t want anymore “sticky substances” on her kitchen counter, but hey, the trip down memory lane was a nice break from reality.