Happy Birthday To Me!!

Ok. Yesterday was my birthday, but still!

 

I am getting up there in years! Having a three year old plus one on the way does not help me feel any younger either!

 

I will blog all about yesterdays adventure some other time though.

 

Today Gage was not feeling well so it was just he, K, and I. B stayed home. All morning we just lounged the Littles played a bit, I had my coffee and browsed through the experiments I have been wanting to try. I didn't want to do anything sensory because Gage wasn't feeling well. Luckily nap time came quickly today so K went down for his nap and Gage and I cuddled for a bit before I pulled out a project for us to try. (At this point Gage's allergy medicine had him feeling almost normal, just VERY stuffed up!)

 

 

The project that we tried out today is one that I of course found on Pinterest. The Pin takes you to this blog:

 

Here

 

I followed her instructions step by step so my pictures will be almost identical to hers. Gage always knows when I am setting up for something fun and I can never seem to get the set up complete before he is standing right beside me asking what we are going to do. He is so eager to learn!

 

 

 I love how excited he is by what he has done! He looks truly fascinated by this.

 

 "Oooooh! Blue mommy!"

 

We both loved this experiment and it was so easy to do, the ingredients needed were ones that we already had in our cupboard! All of the experiments listed on the blog I posted above look worth a try and when I have more prep time I will definitely be doing them with Gage and the Littles!

 

When we finished experimenting K was still sleeping so I looked to my recipes and found the bubble recipe that I have been dying to try out. Once again something I found on Pinterest but the recipe comes from this site:

 

Bubbles

 

Anyway, one of the pins that I saw that had this recipe attached had quoted these bubbles as being the best bubble mix around, or something similar. I thought that I definitely need to test that for myself.

 

Gage and I were genuinely pleased by the outcome. I filled a bin with the mixture I'd made and we pulled out our bubble wands. The mixture that you buy in the stores generally tends to fall apart or be to watery if that makes sense. These ones that we made though were thicker and held together wonderfully.

In the mixing bowl, I let him take a straw and blow into the mixture. He kept telling me, "Look turtles mommy!"

 A little hard to see but that is a big bubble!

 Popping the bubbles.

 Like most things around here, he wound up INSIDE the tub of bubbles playing with them. I suppose that is all a part of discovering though right!

 

I can't wait to blog about yesterdays adventure, but I need to get an okay to use a few of the photos I took first. So when I get the go ahead I will post about that.

 

 

 

Until next time!

 

 

 

Experimenting

A very slow couple of days around here!

 

We did not do many activities the last two days. Yesterday Gage wasn't feeling well and today I wasn't feeling up for the task and my house needed a good cleaning! Back to regularly scheduled events tomorrow though!

 

That being said, over the last two days I decided to experiment with a few fingerpaint recipes floating around Pinterest. I am sure you have seen them and pinned them. Please note that my opinions of these are based on my experience with them they may work better for you then they did for me or worse whichever the case may be.

 

The first one that I tried out yesterday with K and Gage was this:

 

For us, this was one was quite a bust. Aside from having to actually cook the ingredients which makes it difficult to throw together quickly, the end result was very gelatinous and globby. While I will admit it is entirely possible I some how messed something up in the process, I don't think that is likely. I definitely won't be trying this one again.

 

This is what ours turned out as:

 



 

I just wasn't entirely happy with the consistency given it was supposed to be fingerpaint. I let the boys use paint brushes with this but it was just to gooey for them to use without leaving behind globs on the paper.

 

The second one we attempted is one that I saw making its way around Facebook.

 



 

It calls for-

1 cup salt, 1 cup flour, 1 cup water, food coloring.

 

Let me just say that prior to attempting this recipe I really did not grasp just how much 1 cup of salt really is. That is a lot of salt! At first I didn't have enough salt to try this out so I had to pick up some more. Today we gave this a shot, I made it as far as mixing the ingredients but never added the color. As I said before maybe I did it wrong but the consistency and thickness of this one just did not seem like it would be anything that would appeal to the Littles. 

 

Our end result was this:

 

It was extremely thick. Now if I happened to do this wrong and someone else has used this recipe with success I would love to know and know how you did it. For right now though, I won't be attempting this one again either. At this point I was getting fairly frustrated because I was 0 for 2 with 3 rather rowdy attention seeking Littles. I really wanted to find a recipe for home made paint to use with them because of how much paint we manage to go through. And we all know that finger paint is not very cheap.

 

 

The third and last recipe I have tried so far was another one from Pinterest. It is originally from this site:  learncreatelove

 

So far this is my favorite paint recipe. Obviously since the other two turned out to be total busts for us. This one was easy and quick to whip up and the consistency was watery and more like that of paint. The ingredients could be easily found in your kitchen as well. The Littles had a blast with the paint that I made for them to use, well Little B and Gage did. K was not very interested in art today.

 

 

This is what they looked like on paper. A little transparent but they get the job done with no globs!

 

So I hope that this turns out to be useful to someone! I will be experimenting with more home made paint recipes here in the future but these are just our experiences thus far!

 

 

Until tomorrow!



 

Let's Paint!

What a day!

 

Gage hasn't been sleeping well the past few nights. He has been in and out of our room constantly it seems. I am exhausted! On top of all of that though, I believe I may have a pinched nerve or some kind of muscle pull in my back/shoulder area because my hand feels very weak and my wrist seems to hurt almost unbearably. I will eventually get this looked at.

 

 

Today it was just Gage and Little B which was PERFECT. It is so much easier to do activities with two Littles as opposed to three. It may not make much sense as it is only one child different but let me tell you, there is a difference! I wanted to get a rather slow start to things this morning, not to much mess, nothing to loud, you know. So I pulled out some Ziploc bags, poured in some paint and let the Littles have at it. Wouldn't you guess though, that Gage would somehow manage to dig his fingernails into his bag and tear it slightly! Luckily I caught it before it made a HUGE mess. Little B seems to like this style of painting over your traditional finger painting because, as I have stated before, she doesn't like to get her hands dirty.

 

 

After they tired of this, which for Gage was fairly quick, he wanted to pull out the instruments. I thought this was a wonderful idea. Gage took all of our drum like instruments and set to banging away on them with his drumsticks. I swear my boy loves being loud! B played with everything else, the tambourine, the bells, the shaker whatever she could get her little hands around.

 

 

After a good half hour or so of being as loud as possible they decided on some more quite fun! Since I revamped our table with some chalkboard paint it is always fun to draw on! We cleared the table of our previous activities, I gave them each some chalk and we all set to drawing in our little areas. Gage can never seem to stick to one area though so he was drawing over my pictures. Ah toddlers!

 

Nap time brought this mommy some much needed quite time, even if it was only Little B who napped. Gage is pretty self sufficient and does very well playing by himself. I was able to sit back on the couch for a bit, and I will admit browse through a bit of Pinterest for some much needed inspiration, while he sprawled out on the floor with his trains.

 

Once B woke up from her nap we went full force right back into the activities with some more painting!

 

Thanks to my little Pinterest browse session, I decided it would be fun to have the kids paint with pom poms. It was perfect because B wouldn't have to use her hands but Gage could if he wanted to. Let's just say that it was quite a hit with both of them.

 

 I think B couldn't help but wonder why her yellow pom pom was producing every color EXCEPT yellow on the paper. She kept looking at it and checking to see what was going on. It was quite entertaining.

 

 

 After Pom poms, I took a stab at painting with credit cards with them. Gage wanted no part of it and the concept wasn't too easy for B to grasp so that was VERY short lived!

 I do however enjoy the concept as well as the finished product so I will be coming back to it later.

 

Since our day had consisted almost entirely of painting I wanted to give Gage something that would work his brain a bit. I took our foam triangle blocks and dumped them on to two trays, one with rice, one with Epsom salt. I had originally planned for B to take part as well but she had a hard time mastering the tongs well enough to move the blocks from one place to the other so I let Gage have at both. He made very quick work of both trays. I won't lie, it took me by surprise how fast he had finished. My bug definitely loves stretching his mind because the whole time he was moving blocks he would call out "Red triangle" "Blue triangle" and you get the picture. I hadn't asked him to do this so I love that he took it upon himself to.

 

Well should everything stay as scheduled, I will only have K and Gage tomorrow. I will probably repeat one or two of todays activities so that K can experience them but right now I need to try and map out tomorrow. I have been trying to get better at planning the night before so that I am not stressing to hard in the morning over what we are going to do.

 

As always thanks for reading! For updates throughout our day you can follow our adventures on Facebook at:

 

Tales of a Toddler

 

or if you would like to see where my ideas come from you can follow my Preschooling board on Pinterest:

Here

 

 

 



 

 Until tomorrow!