Shaving Cream Skating

It's amazing how much fun you can have with a tarp (less than $6 at walmart & target), 2 cans of shaving cream, and 2.5 year old! We've done this since our older two girls were very little and I knew Emmy would have a blast with it also. From the very first second she felt the slippery shaving cream squish through her toes, she was giggling! We had so much fun watching her delight in the wonder of slipping, sliding, falling, rolling, and making "snow" angels in the shaving cream. With our older girls, we would let them bring the rectangle pool floats and slide across the shaving cream like sledding.

Jumping in Rain Puddles

Texas is in a drought. Seems like we are every summer, but this drought has been a long one. When we get rain, it's all the reason we need to celebrate! It was fun to take a walk through the neighborhood and do a little jumping in rain puddles.

Handlebar mustache

I'm not going to share the pics of my older girls in their mustaches because I'm sure they would die of embarrassment. But I cannot resist sharing the pics of Heath and Emmy.

Sidewalk Chalk Painting

Sidewalk chalk painting is so much fun and so inexpensive when you make it at home. It is simply cornstarch, food coloring, and water.

The general recipe is:

1/4 cup cornstarch
few drops of food coloring
1/4 cup water.

However, I find you can add more water than that and it works fine-at least doubling the water. The tip is to use hot water because it will make the cornstarch easier to mix. If you have a bake shop near you, you can find ENDLESS colors of food coloring.

I apologize for the quality of the pictures. It's summertime in Texas which means we save most of the outdoor activities until after it gets cooler in the evening.

Yes, I'm sure we got plenty of looks when people went by and saw my (almost) 3yr old with a big paint roller painting our driveway and walkways, but that never bothers me a bit. They just don't know what they're missing out on ;)




She asked several times why she couldn't paint Daddy's work truck ;)

Salt Painting

This activity is interesting for all ages including mommas! It is great for working on colors, color mixing (yellow and blue make green), and creative experimenting.

QUICK DIRECTIONS:

I recommend using white construction paper so you can see the colors mix.
Make a design on the paper with glue. I just squirted it straight out of the bottle in a design.
Sprinkle salt generously on top of the glue and then shake the excess. Yup, just like with glitter.
Dab your paint brush in watered down food coloring.
Gently touch the brush onto the salt design and lift quickly.
You will see the color immediately spread.
If you want to practice color mixing, simply dab the two colors close to one another.
The colors will run together and mix.
So fun!

SUPPLIES:
salt, food coloring (mixed with water), paintbrush, and white construction paper.

Considering you can buy salt for 33cents a container, you could do this activities endlessly.

Emmy's first sewing project

A while back, I found a small embroidery hoop and used a piece of cloth from my fabric stash to show Emmy how to sew. Embroidery needles are blunt tipped so there's no threat of poking themselves with a sharp needle.

Octopus Spaghetti

We never have any problems getting Emmy to eat spaghetti, or any other pasta for that matter. We found this fun idea for Octopus Spaghetti and thought we'd give it a try.

Split the dry uncooked spaghetti noodles in half. Push the noodles through the meatball. Don't bunch the noodles all together or it will split the meatball or crack it as the noodles will obviously expand as they cook. But, as you can tell from the following picture, it's so easy, a baby could do it ;)

Just like this....

Yes honey, that IS the way it's supposed to look.

Now show how proud you are of yourself!

Now you just throw the noodle meatballs into boiling water and cook until the noodles are done.

Toss in spaghetti sauce and eat up.

Yes baby, I PROMISE, that is what it's supposed to look like. Hehe.

Now giggle like crazy when the noodles tickle your chin when you eat your Octopus Spaghetti.

Going on a bug hunt

We picked up this little bug set at the dollar store. The container and set of tongs came together and we bought the bugs separately. I hid the bugs in the yard and let Emmy come out and find them (getting more practice at the tongs.)

A Paint brush by any other name...

For the life of me, I cannot remember where I saw this. I promise, I'll look for the link. It is from a company that does clinics for teachers (public, homeschool, daycare teachers, etc) on different ways to do art with children. It basically teaches you to think outside the box and look at everything you see as a potential tool for painting, science, and experiments. With that said, I'll get on with the post.

For paint brushes, I used old crayola markers that had dried out. left the cap on and used duct tape to tape on things like strands of rubber bands, q-tips, and strands of a mop head. These were very quick and easy and a very green project. Though not in these pictures, I have done fly swatter painting in the past as well as painting with turkey basters.

I also used old nylon stockings (you can get these for like 33cents at walmart in little plastic eggs at the end of the aisle in the women's sock section.) I put popcorn kernels inside and tied it up. It becomes very "slinky" and leaves a great design. A funny note about this one is that we finished painting and I washed the stocking w/corn clean of paint and set it in a pot on the back patio because we were going to use it again soon. Sure enough, I forgot about it. A week or so ago, I found it and it had TONS growing in it. We were growing corn! How funny! The strange part is that it obviously wasn't being watered and we are in a drought. The stocking was too thick for the corn to be able to push through so it on kept growing and stretching the stocking. I wish I had taken a picture of it. The growths were all about 5 inches long at least and only about 10-15 of the kernels hadn't "bloomed."