We love having friends over to swim! Slap some life vests on the non-swimmers, add some pool noodles, noodle connectors, goggles and the Millenium Falcon, and watch the fun unfold!
Rub a dub, dub, three men in a tub!Splash Wars!Henry learning to dive.Anna pedaling around the pool.
Sorry if I just got that song stuck in your head! (But it’s been stuck in mine all afternoon, and my mother always taught me to share…)
So. One bottle of shaving cream (the foaming kind) + two cookie sheets + a handful of plastic frogs and lizards = some messy clean fun!
A rather incongrous collection of items.
Anna at first said, “I don’t like this squishy!” but after a bit of encouragement got into it. Unfortunately, despite repeated reminders that it was shaving cream and not whipped cream, she eventually succumbed to the temptation to taste it. Raspberry scented shaving cream apparently tastes rather disappointing when you’re expecting whipped cream!
This was only the beginning. She got much messier.Frogs and lizards in the foam.
Carolyn, on the other hand, loved the experience and spent the entire hour I was prepping dinner squishing, molding, tracing, poking and patting the stuff. At one point I looked over and she had re-created the leaning tower of Pisa. She also made a volcano, and then a lake (for the frogs and lizards) and I think she was trying to make a raceway when I finally had to clear everything off the table for dinner.
She thought her foamy hands were hilarious!Messy, messy fun.
So, shaving cream free play was (mostly) a hit here. I seriously doubt Anna will try to eat it again, and it was so ridiculously easy to clean up I’d be happy to let them play with it another time!
I don’t, as a rule, buy bubble bath for the kids. As fun as it looks, in the Dora, Princess and My Little Pony flavors it comes in, it just dries out their skin and makes them itchy.
Proto-bubble bath.
So today, we made our own! I came across this recipe, and believe it or not, we already had all of these things in the house. (Yes, including glycerin. I bought it to reactivate some Wilton colors but never used it.) I cut it in half because we only had 3 6oz travel bottles on hand to store the finished product in.
Add the castille soap...Pouring in the glycerin...
We had three essential oils: lavender, peppermint and eucalyptus. We made one of each, and the girls seemed to prefer the peppermint. The eucalyptus was a hard sell, but I told them we’d save it for cold season.
A trio of good-smelling soaps.
There was a bit leftover in our mixing bowl, so we added a couple more drops of peppermint and ran it with some warm water into a bigger bin so the kids could have a “hand bubble bath”. (I had an ulterior motive – Carolyn’s piano lesson is this afternoon and she had purple playdough stuck under her fingernails from earlier.)
Splish, splash!
Note that it doesn’t appear to be particularly bubbly, but the kids really like how it smells, so I think they’ll have fun putting it in their bath anyway!
This summer is flying right by! Our theme this week is “Good, Clean Fun.” I have some fun projects in mind that will likely be more messy than clean, but they’ll certainly be fun! Today’s project is a science experiment suggested by my friend Jenny: microwaving soap.
First order of business was to buy soap. (Yes, we do bathe & shower here, but long ago switched to liquid bath soap (less soap scum to clean out of the showers) so there are no bars of soap in the house!) The recommendation was to use brand-name Ivory to make this work. (For more about the reason this works, I liked this site.)
Soap. On a plate.
Next step: cut the soap in half and place on a paper plate.
Poor, innocent soap...
We put the soap in the (rather dirty) microwave for 2 minutes. It was clearly done expanding by 1:15, so we stopped it and checked it out. Anna disappeared in terror – it apparently smelled unpleasant to her, plus it’s a texture and shape that doesn’t really appear naturally…
Mutant soap from outer space?!?
But Carolyn thought it was fabulous. I had to ask her to stop using pieces of it to wash her hands! (I bet there was a blip in our water usage this afternoon!) So now we have a plate of foamy, crazy soap in our bathroom. And 2.5 bars of Ivory soap to find other ways to use.
Look, ma, clean hands!
And my microwave (after a little extra elbow grease on my part) is now spotless.
Look, ma, clean microwave!
While I was performing science experiments in the kitchen, I whipped up some of the “ultimate” glass cleaner from here. I have to say, it did an impressive job on the family room window, which the dogs love to cover with nose prints. I think I’d have to agree that it’s the ultimate homemade class cleaner!
After the girls had played enough with the dyed pasta, we made Sunrise Lemonade (from Salad People.)
Lemonade essentials!
It was a pretty simple recipe (I had to make “simple syrup” – just a mix of equal parts sugar and water – before we started) and the manual juicer I bought worked really well (though the kids needed some help for that step!)
Mmmm. Fresh-squeezed lemon juice.Lemon juice, simple syrup & water being stirred.Add the frozen juice concentrate...
The verdict? Lots of thumbs up, and requests to make it again very soon!
Everything's better through long twisty straws!Delicious!
Then for dinner tonight (we were on a roll) we made Sweet Potato Surprise (also from Salad People) and Lollipop Chicken. (That recipe was from a Parenting magazine at the dentist’s office this afternoon. I shamelessly begged them to make a copy for me.) The surprising bit was that my children ate dinner. It’s amazing how calling something “lollipop chicken” and serving it on a stick makes it so much more appealing!
We left the pasta to dry thoroughly overnight, and look how fabulous the colors turned out!
A rainbow of pasta.
I decided to use chenille stems (pipe cleaners, as they were known in my childhood) instead of yarn so we wouldn’t have to worry about using a yarn needle or anything to string the pasta shapes.
Intense concentration...A yellow strand of pasta.The pasta isn't so stinky today!A pattern of rainbows!
The girls loved this project! I’m wishing I had colored many other shapes of pasta while we were at it, I could see flatter shapes being a lot of fun to use in a gluing project. We’ve seen how much my children enjoy glue!
Glamorous pasta fashions - the newest trend!
I won’t buy food with artificial dyes anymore, but I have no qualms about using dyes for our summer of crafts! I thought we could try making colored pasta shapes for stringing necklaces.
Looks like it's time to make a mess!
I found lots of different “recipes” for coloring pasta, all of which contradicted each other. So I just winged it! We put about a cup of pasta in each freezer bag – 1/2 cup each mezzi rigatoni and rotelle (wheels). Then I took a toothpick and put some of each color on the inside surface of each bag. Finally, I poured a tablespoon of rubbing alcohol into each bag.
I used the "good" baggies for this: the double-sealed variety!
The girls helped me squish the bags around (I made sure they were well sealed!) to distribute the color, and then we let them sit for a couple of hours.
Poke, poke...are they ready yet?!?
Once we thought the colors were deep enough, we (well, mostly I) spread the pasta out on baking sheets covered with wax paper. The girls were excited to watch, but Anna thinks the pasta is stinky. The rubbing alcohol is rather…pungent. But the pasta dried very quickly, and I imagine will be put to good use tomorrow!
That pasta is *stinky*!
(And my fingers are only a little colorful.)
Love the intense colors!
Oh! And we found apple raspberry frozen juice concentrate, so hopefully that will work for our sunrise lemonade. (Lemon-apple-raspberry? Could be good, could be n0t-so-good. We’ll find out tomorrow!) We also acquired a few packets of lemon-lime and berry blue Kool-Aid. The lady at the checkout seemed fairly taken aback when Carolyn told her we were using it to make playdough. I suppose that’s not really a “normal” thing to do with Kool-Aid…
This week’s theme is “What’s Cooking?” This means that most of our “crafts” are going to be of the edible variety! This evening for dinner we made our homemade pizza dough, and I had two eager helpers. I didn’t have any free hands to take pictures, but the two girls in oversized aprons (Carolyn wore one of mine and Anna wore Carolyn’s) were pretty darn cute!
Yesterday, we planned which of the recipes in Salad People we want to make this week, and managed to get most of the ingredients in our shopping trip this afternoon. I still have to find frozen cranberry juice concentrate – all that store had was cranberry juice cocktail.
