Category: Kids Need Play

Dear Reader,

First of all, I have no intention of these cookies making it until Easter. In fact, most of them were eaten by the end of the night. But We all just needed something fun to do. So we busted out some spring sprinkles, I whipped up some frosting, and some cookies, and we all just sat at the table.

I put a dab of frosting on everyone’s cookies and piled sprinkles on their plates and passed out plastic spoons. By putting the frosting in a dollop I kept from cross-contamination when my toddlers licked their spoons. Because that happened. And all the sprinkles were unceremoniously dumped on top. But I didn’t care. I wasn’t giving them to anyone but the designers, so it worked for me. I feel like usually when we make cookies, they’re going to someone and I cringe at all the sprinkles or the lumpy frosting. It was fun to just let them play. I wish I could say they ate all their cookies… But they ate the frosting and the sprinkles and I ended up throwing licked-clean cookies away after I sent them to bed.

Dear Reader,

A few weeks ago, when I was looking at color activities, I came across the book Every Color Soup. I decided it’d make a good activity for St. Patrick’s Day, so we checked the book out from our local library. Then I went ahead and cut all the vegetables and made my kids go wash their hands (I’m so over sicknesses this winter! I’m being a huge stickler on handwashing. No free passes!)

I read them the book, as well as one called Too Many Leprechauns (saw it as we were walking in and it was perfect!), and then said we were gonna make a rainbow for dinner. (*ps, not an amazon affiliate. I don’t get paid anything for sending you to them. Buy the book if and where you want! Maybe shop locally!).

I put the pot in the middle of the table, and we added the ingredients as they came up (note, not all of them are pictured below. They’re not in the rainbow, lol).

By the way, I bought French lentils from Amazon and they didn’t even stay blue! The recipe called for lentils du puy but a) I couldn’t find anything but orangey red or green lentils in the store, and b) google said French lentils were the ones considered blue. Shoulda trusted the book, I guess.

Either way, this activity was perfect! First because it talked about colors (something my toddlers are extremely interested in right now), and secondly, because one of my toddlers is very into “I cook like Mom,” right now.

I know playdough is not super-pricey, but I’m still a cheapskate. My girls would go through a million tubes if I’d let them. Playdough is not my favorite activity, honestly. Kids+playdough≠neatness. Plus, I figure that if they’re gonna make such a mess of the playdough, they can take care of it, too. It’s called responsibility!

Between that and the fact that I’ve been in a decluttering mood lately, it was time to go through the playdough. That bug seems to hit the second the sun comes out in spring and when my life feels out of balance. For me, my brain is all tied to my house; when my brain feels cluttered, the easiest solution is to declutter my house, and then somehow my brain seems less scattered.

years and years ago, I came across  this site. This person is a GENIUS! I’ve used this hack so many times.

She advises you to break the play doh into pea-sized pieces (if I bother at all, we used the extruder. Much less time-consuming. Or if it was too hard to go through the extruder, we just crumbled it. 2 of ours were that far gone.) Then we sprayed a spray bottle of water into the bag and shook the bag up to evenly coat. Then we waited a few minutes (more like a few hours, I got distracted), and then I hand the bag to my toddlers (and watch them! No exploded playdough bags, please. Also, make sure they’re not full of a lot of air). It’s a good sensory activity for them, plus it builds hand strength.

Sometimes I spray them again and shake them up, but most of the time, they’re as good as new by the end.

And if you accidentally add too much water (done that) either mix more dry dough in or leave the bag open and check it about once an hour.

And to think, Play Doh says it can’t be done and you’ll have to buy another tub…

Dear Reader,

I think we are gonna have a lot of toddlers-want-to-be-like-sisters posts in our future. This one, included. When they say sister using paint for apples, they wanted to paint, too. I wasn’t in the mood to deal with that huge of a mess, even if I made sure to buy the washable paint, so I filled a few quart bags with the same red paint, taped them shut, and handed them to the twins.

They liked the squishy aspect, and kinda drew with the paint, but their favorite thing to do was to squish their handprints into the paint bag. It was a really good sensory experience for them, actually! And I totally just came up with it on the fly, since I was in the middle of helping big sister with /a/ apples.

And naturally, since sister was using an apple to stamp with, we had to eat apples at the same time. Since my toddlers are learning colors, it was also a good time to reiterate that their apple was red and their paint was red.