A new Easter activity after the eggs are colored!

Happy April!  We're getting ready for Easter at our house, we colored eggs a couple days ago.  My daughter is now 4 and really enjoyed coloring them this year!  After the fun of egg coloring is done, we still have a lot of egg coloring materials sitting around... the little colored cups, vinegar, and food coloring.  So we discovered a new "Easter" activity to do! My daughter is calling this an Easter activity - so i'm going with it!

It's the same principal as the "volcano project" from grade school but this activity is less time to set up and it's geared towards preschoolers! 

Materials needed:
-Egg coloring cups (or any other cup/plastic container will do)
-Medicine dropper
-Liquid food coloring
-Vinegar
-Baking Soda
-Baking Pan

Set up:
Super easy! Pour vinegar in your cups, add food coloring. Put a layer of baking soda in your pan and your ready to go!  Took me 3 minutes to set it up.

She really enjoyed squeezing the dropper over the baking soda and watching it bubble up and listening to it fizz!  This is a fantastic rainy day (or windy day - here) activity when it's not fun to be outside! It held her attention for almost an hour and if you have a preschooler you know this is golden!

 

Then she got crazy and started mixing baking powder into cups, getting Dora and Diego involved...she had a ball with a smile on her face the whole time. 

 

I wonder if this "science experiment" will increase chances of her becoming a doctor?!?

Bath time foam painting!

This is a great rainy or snowy day indoor activity!  My daughter loves having activities in the tub, we've done bath paints and bath crayons, but I decided to amp it up! 

I've done plain foam before using men's shave cream, the smell is just too strong for me....and it lingers in the tub so I wasn't interested in going down that road again, but you can certainly try it....I think i'm sensitive to smells anyway :-)

So, we started with bath foam - we scored these free at a garage sale, still sealed up! You can buy it in the soap/bubble bath aisles at Target/Walmart. I squirted some foam into each tin cup, added traditional food coloring (just a drop or 2) to get a variety of colors, then mixed it together using a toothpick.

I love gel food coloring but for this project the liquid stuff was easier to mix in and I didn't want to risk the potent gel color dying my tub (in the new house)!  I let my daughter help out with the mixing so that was incorporated into the activity!

In the tub I gave her some paint brushes (I think she preferred using her hands!), then after the foam was gone, she used the tin like a boat for her tub toys!

Super easy, simple, quick activity to do that will yield at least a half hour of play! We even made the clean up part of the activity!

Dog Park Sensory Box!

We finally got around to making a dog park sensory box, I mentioned wanting to do this in the Wizard of Oz Sensory Box blog post, and it's finally done!

To get the dry rice green, you need to mix green traditional food coloring (not gel for this project)with vinegar, if you were to do this with water I imagine it would eventually make the rice soggy and gross.  Mix the rice with the vinegar mixture in small batches and the color will start to bleed into the rice. Once it's all mixed spread out the rice onto dry towels to get any bid of moisture out, it seemed to dry quickly for me (in dry Montana). It does make a crackling noise when it's drying - kinda fun! I let it sit and completely dry for about 2 hours before putting into the box.
Then I gathered all the doggie themed today and we put together the dog park!

 I just mixed it on the lid of the box so there were no puddles of vinegar mixture anywhere.

As you can see the rice won't all be the same color, some came out more green some not nearly as much color was picked up.

Homemade play dough with only 2 ingredients from your kitchen that you can make now!

Play dough is fun to play with and fun to make (even for adults)! I've found so many different recipes for homemade play dough on the internet, you could search for days.  Some work great and some....not so much.  We tried a couple different recipes which I tweaked a little bit to make them my own.  The first one (epic fail) was a corn starch and hair conditioner 2 ingredient recipe, it never came together to form a nice dough and just created a sticky mess.  It wasn't a complete waste, because my daughter enjoyed mashing it around in the bowl with her hands.  We added some pink food color gel to it (Wilton) and some glitter. It wasn't something that we could even save.  Once we tossed this one and cleaned up our mess, we tried another recipe. 
The second time we used flour and Palmolive dish soap, another 2 ingredient play dough!

 

 I didn't do any exact measuring with this, but approximately started with 1 cup of flour. We continued to add the dish soap into the bowl of flour and tossing it with our fingers until it was the right consistency then just mashed and mooshed it until it was play dough-y perfection!

 I waited a couple days before blogging this to see if it would breakdown, or get a foul smell, and it hasn't! No residue on our hands either.  I'm storing it in a zip top baggie and it's staying nice and moist.  We didn't add any food coloring, but i'm sure you could.  It's just a pale green color from the Palmolive soap color. I bet you could use any dish soap you have around your kitchen for this, and it would be fun to try some dish soaps with different colors to get a variety of dish soap play dough's!

 

 

Super Fun DIY Chalk Paint

This is a really quick and easy project to set up! My 3 year old had a lot of fun playing with chalk paint!

 I mixed corn starch and water, I just eye balled the amounts, not too watery, not to thick. If you let it sit, the corn starch will settle to the bottom, just mix it again and it's as good as new. I divided out the mixture into a muffin tin then added food coloring.

  I used both traditional liquid food coloring and gel food coloring. The Wilton gel food coloring is nice, a little bit goes a long way and the colors are so vibrant and rich! Mix each tin cup up with the colors you choose and your ready to play!

  We did the chalk painting on the concrete with paint brushes and fingers! The good news it's easy to clean up by just using a hose or waiting til it rains. It didn't make the grass starchy or anything either. Her clothes came out of the wash like new, no stains or corn starch goo.

 It was a really fun project and we'll do it again!

Crazy year!

It's been a long long time since I've hung around my blog and for good reason, we've had a crazy busy year.  Last January (2014) we made an offer on a short sale house....9 months later after many ups and downs we finally got it! We've been in our new home in for about 4 1/2 months now.  During that time we were busy traveling to Minnesota twice - once for a vacation, once for a wedding, traveled to Florida, and had friends and family visit us here in Montana. After we signed the papers for the house we had to travel to South Dakota....literally that day so we didn't even get to move in until November, it didn't feel like we were at our new house long before we traveled to Nebraska for Thanksgiving.  Then we had family visit for Christmas. My daughter and I also just got back from visiting my mom in Florida for a couple weeks.  Sooo now that we're good and settled in I can start my blog up again.
Oh also during all that time I started doing craft fairs!!!  So much fun!  So far I've done 2 and i'm doing a small local one this weekend.  I also managed to paint walls in the house right after we moved in, before furniture got put where it goes....After painting when we moved into our first house and then painting again when we sold it....i'm not a fan of painting walls...so I new I would loose steam quickly so during my daughter's first and second day of preschool I got all the painting done! Thanks to the previous homeowners for leaving paint cans for me to use!

Why I love Once Upon A Child

Have you ever been to this store? 
Prior to moving, a "Once Upon A Child" store opened very close to the Animal Hospital I worked at.  I soon became a frequent flyer there!  They are a second hand store, and are a pretty large chain! At first I was apprehensive, thinking they're gonna have smelly and stained clothing, but I was wrong.   They only accept gently used clothing and gently used toys.  I've found a lot of nice inexpensive clothes for my daughter. I've also been able to bring in clothes that don't fit her and get money on the spot for them!  You can do a trade for new stuff from the store! Why spend full price on kids clothes when they grow out of them so fast?! 

 Onward to the heart of this post...I found this Dora house, with tons of stuff!

Tons of stuff!

 

 

She wanted to lie down with the Dora people

So Detailed!

 A mini van, play set, store, and pool along with stuff for the inside; beds, chairs, tables, toilet, even the kitchen sink!....just tons of stuff, oh and it is battery operated so Dora talks to her in English and Spanish when she pushes different things in the house!  I saw it in the store for $35 dollars. It seemed like a great deal, but I first went home and did a little google research and found out that Yes, it's an awesome deal.  So I went back later that day (luckily they still had it) and I got it.  We saved it for Christmas, and put all the parts in a bunch of different boxes so she had a lot of presents to open up.  This was defiantly her favorite Christmas present! She plays with it all the time....no joke as i'm writing this she's walking down the stairs from her nap asking if her Dora house is out. 

We don't have a Once Upon A Child store near where we live anymore, so sad. Whenever we're in a town with a Once Upon A Child, I make sure we stop!  If you have this store and haven't checked it out, you must!