Homemade Playdough

Some blogs I read to read. Other blogs I just look at for the recipe, or other pertinent information, like some random delicious thing from Pintrest. Don't know you, don't care, just tell me how I can make myself and my family fatter. So here is my important information for the day.

No cook, No cream of tartar Playdough

3 cups flour

1 1/2 cups salt

1/4 cup oil

1 cup water

splash of vinegar

food coloring

Mix all the ingredients together except for the food coloring. Add more flour or water to get the right consistency. Knead until you get something playdough like. Separate the dough into portions, put a few drops on food coloring onto each portion. Knead until color is distributed.

If you don't want to get color on your hands, you can add the color to the water before you add it to your mix. But then, what is the fun in that?

I don't know if the vinegar actually does anything, but somewhere I read that it is a substitution for Cream of Tartar. What is Cream of Tartar anyways? J asked me if it was what tartar sauce is made from. I don't think it is, the only, only place I've ever seen it used is in homemade playdough. I don't think the Cream of Tartar people are sailing giant yachts around with stacks on ice.

Well, this is what it was doing today. In April. Lame.

So today I thought it was as good a day as any to get back to actually doing fun things with the boys and recording them to prove to everyone that we don't just play the wii all day.  When we were on the way home from the gym (like that?  I just throw that in there so everyone knows how buff I am), and I told the boys were would be making playdough today. J started crying because, well, I'm not sure, but he was adamant about not playing with playdough.  Once we got started he says, "Oh! Its not like regular playdough! Its cool because its different."  This was a good activity because once we did the initial making of the stuff, they kept themselves long enough for me to nurse the baby, watch the end of an HGTV show (thats the good part anyways), and drink a delicious Dr. Pepper in peace.  No one asked me for any drinks or snacks or to pull up their pants. What a nice break.  

So as we were playing, A asks, "Is it yummy?" I'm all about learning from your experience, so I figured I'd let him discover if it was yummy or not.  He took a pretty big hunk of it, stuck the whole thing in his mouth, and decided it was NOT yummy, but kept chewing and swallowed it anyways!  Weird kid.  So from then on everything he made was a "salt burrito" or a "salt christmas tree".  

I love how my kids run with things.  I generally don't have to prod them to take things to the next level (not always a good thing), and so the dinosaurs came out.  Then all the animals.  Then J wanted to make a movie of his clay.  There is an awesome iphone/ipad app called Gif Shop.  It is a super user friendly stop motion animation app that gets a lot of use in our house.  J's movie was an exploding volcano, the lava envelops the dinosaur, which turns to bones, then a scientist comes along and excavates the bones (made from cardboard) to take to his lab.  Maybe if I figure out how to post it here I will. Someday.  

Look who can't participate!

We finished off our playdough afternoon with a Pingu- clay animation- marathon from Netflix streaming, popcorn and "rootbeer" floats.  (don't tell anyone it was Dr. Pepper, they only get a little bit anyways)

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drowning in paint

We've been painting a lot. Finger paint, water colors, we even just picked up a wooden snake from the craft store on clearance that came with paints that we can paint. Our poor dining room table is all painty, but that is what it is for. Its not like we have fancy dinners on it anyways. The Queen won't be over for our hot dogs and creamy corn any time soon. But here is something more fun to do with water color paint than just your run of the mill grass and sun picture. We blew around our paints with a straw to make fun designs. The little ones can even work on their blowing skills (that is a skill, right?) J likes to get psychological and make Rorschach images out of his paintings that are blobs, so that explains the second picture.

And one more hour of summer down, thousands more to go...

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Don't underestimate the power of a baby pool

Man today was hot. The whole, "You live by the beach, you get the ocean breeze" thing is totally false. First, I do NOT live by the beach. I would not ride my bike there, it would take entirely too long and I would be way too hot and sweaty by the time I got there, so no. So, there is no, I repeat, no ocean breeze. We have suffered for years without air conditioner. No one has it here. We sit with our feet in ice water, cold towels around our necks, and baby pools. Lots of baby pools. This was our first of the year, and as you can see, we didn't even stop to change into swim suits. Jonas is in his tighty whities and Asher ended up with a giant diaper under his onesie (yes, a onesie-he can't be trusted in shirt and pants, the wiener ends up on the outside too often and a pee pee mess ensues). You guys are lucky I didn't include the photo of Jonas acting like the Statue of Liberty.

Anyhoo, we rushed in from school, dumped our books on the table and started filling the pool, dusting off the spiders from the bottom. The oldest got into the sippy cup drawer for all of the toys and the little one sat right in as soon as he had his shoes off. Impromptu fun is the best kind. I got to read a magazine with my toes in the pool and they were busy for a long time. Oh, and spray sunscreen is the best. Up and Up sport sunscreen continuous spray is getting the best reviews as the safest, cheapest and most effective right now. None of the cancer causing retinyl palmitate and it goes on fast.

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Homemade "lava lamp"

So is today more of a science day or more of a hippie day? Good news, you are in luck. You can do both. Plus, there is the added bonus of downing your favorite soda in the name of science. "Sorry, mommy needs Dr. Pepper today so you can have fun with the bottle later dear."

Materials for the "lava lamp"
-plastic bottle
-vegetable oil
-water
-liquid food coloring
-funnel
-plastic cup

Directions:
Fill the plastic cup with water, add food coloring and mix.
Pour vegetable oil into the empty bottle until it is 1/2 to 3/4 full. (use the funnel)
Add the colored water to the bottle.
Put the cap on the bottle tight- don't stir or shake it (not yet any ways- do that later for fun)

(Something else we've done to "recycle")

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The best $1.24 I spend all month

Cornstarch + water = at least a half an hour of peace and quiet.

Any trip to the grocery store down the baking isle with a kid would usually illicit requests for various boxes of brownie mix or chocolate chips, but my oldest kid is way more into looking on the very tippy top shelf for the Cornstarch. Come home from the grocery store, put the baby in bed, and don't just mix up a little of the cornstarch goo like they show you in school. Mix up the whole darn box. Add just a little water at a time and reserve some cornstarch just in case you add too much water. You want just enough to have a thick gluey consistency. Its actually fun to play with at different levels of wetness. Is it a liquid? Is it a solid? Is it my favorite thing to come out of the grocery store since the free cookies by the bakery? While my big kid is squeezing, punching, hiding toys, and making a tiny mess, I am cleaning out the refrigerator and doing like Rachel Ray says to and chopping my veggies before I store them and organizing my pantry and making a healthy snack for us to eat after I sweep up the dried up corn starch from the floor. Love it. To entertain big J a little longer, he loves to watch "cornstarch monsters" on Time Warp on You Tube. We sort of tried it one day. We took a bowlful of the goo and put it on a large square foot messager and tried to get it to "dance". It kind of wiggled around, but that was about it. I still get begged for a giant speaker to make the monsters every time we see the Time Warp clip. Right, next Christmas, I promise...

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The Slircus-Our slimy circus

My dad would freak if he saw how nice we were being to snails this weekend. He used to chuck those things over the fence into the irrigation ditch behind his garden or find all kinds of different poisons to send them to their foamy demise. We were as nice as a couple of kids could be to some snails. We had a Slircus, a slimy circus (aka a snircus, a circus for snails). We collected snails, built them circus-y things to do and climb on, and set aside a morning to watch them and hopefully not put anything disgusting into the little one's mouth. Most of our fun was in waking up and finding snails in our pijamas. Snails only come out in the early morning before it dries out and gets hot, so we had to be quiet around our apartment complex around people's windows and yards collecting our circus performers. Asher would spot one and yell, "Nail! Nail!" Our neighborhood kids think our apartment complex is friggin' Six Flags most of the time anyways, so our Slircus makes a little noise one Saturday morning? They'll live.



We put them in their cages with some high protein energy food (leaves) so they could build their strength for all of the work they'd be doing in their circus acts. We had a circus-y looking top for them to spin on, we made a tight rope, got some paint out and some paper plates they could paint on, and have a merry go round ride if they wanted, and other various things for them to crawl on. There was great joy in watching them spin around (a little too fast on the top, but they seem to have amazing grip), poking their eyes in, watching their incredible tight rope skills, and making friends with our little Slircus performers.


But things took a macabre turn when the little one started stomping on them whenever he could get them on their own. He's not heavy enough to really squash them, so I had to put them out of their misery, and I'm just too sensitive to animals to handle this. I wanted to cry. Then when we wanted to have them "paint" I plopped one down into some red paint, it started to bubble up, Jonas gets all excited saying its starting to spit with glee, probably at the prospect of the joy of painting, more than dying a slow and painful death, which was likely what I was subjecting him to. But I know that snails aren't supposed to percolate- I grew up with three older brothers, I've seen all kinds of insect torture. Once they caught a giant fly, super glued it to a lego, put it in the microwave to watch its wings flutter, then threw it over the balcony of the apartment. I washed off the snail, he was fine when I checked on him over an hour later. (my Dad is shaking his head right now) This was a fun way to spend a Saturday morning, and aside from the snail stomping, a nice closeup lesson with nature.

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Paper Airplane Extravaganza

"Mom-I wannoo make paper airplanes" -translation: "Mom, would you spend the next hour trying to figure out how to make me paper airplanes and make a lot of them until your fingers bleed from papercuts?"

I found site with 10 different airplanes that had decent instructions to help me make planes beyond the ugly ones that come apart in mid air that I am used to making. The "spinster" is the coolest one and works the best (which my dad swears he invented), and the "moth" is a good one too. By the end, I started to "mod" my planes like an expert- cutting notches, angling wings up and down. I'm still no pro, and their dad would probably be better at this- but hey, whatever.

Because my oldest isn't like other kids, he decided we'd play "hidden planes find them" and while I emptied the dishwasher, he hid them and I had to sneak up on them and say "PLANE!", then throw it. He then made up songs about each of his airplanes for the next hour. I suggested he decorate them, he responded "I don't decorate my planes." Oh well.


This is the reason why we make things when the baby is taking a nap.

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