I know you are all dying to know how to frozen balloons turned out! Unfortunately, I am in the same boat. I forgot to go check them the next day and by the time the next weekend (and chance for good lighting) rolled around, the snow had melted and all of the balloons popped. I don't know if it was the dry grass that got them, but they were all goners! Of course, when I thought to take a photo to show their sad state, they had gotten snowed on. Such uncooperative weather...!
Thomas was super bummed and kept telling me "Balloons popped." I know son - I'm sad too. We'll just have to try again when it gets cold again. I'm sure there is plenty of winter left...
Cupcake liner fish! I saw this one and thought it was easy enough for Thomas to do and thanks to Grannie, we have a ton of cupcake liners. I found the most colorful ones and let Thomas go to town with the scissors. He was supposed to cut triangles for the tails, I ended up just finding the most triangular shaped fragments and made it work. I think he was most excited about the "goo-goo" eyes. Love toddler mispronunciations! (And another appearance by Olwin and his buddy James!)
This one was in the quiet activity suggestions. Basically you give a toddler a bowl full of pom-poms and scoops or such to play with. I figured he would just throw them on the floor and be done... Wrong - he played with them the whole time I was making dinner. And that is why I rely on others to give me good ideas!
This one falls in the fail category. It was supposed to be slime that you make from glue. Well it did not make slime, it made a chunk of... I'm not sure how to describe it. But anyhow I think I added the Borax incorrectly and it just seized up into a glue mass. I'll try it again, but for now it was a fail.
This one looked fun - painting without the mess! And without Henry getting paint in his mouth... You put blobs of paint in a plastic bag and tape it down so they can play with it - preferably on a white surface so they can clearly see the colors and the mixing. Henry seemed interested at first...
But quickly decided ripping it off was more fun. He was so proud of himself when he got it off his tray. Then he made eye contact with me, held it for a second and dropped it on the floor. Ha - this little guy has some attitude!
Snow painting with colored water! It was a bit of a fail. The snow kept clumping up on the brush, but Thomas seemed to be enjoying it - so we improvised.
Snow spraying! This he loved. It took him a few tries to get the hang of spraying, but then he had a blast coloring the snow. I did give him yellow, but then decided I didn't really want him to associate yellow snow with "pick up and play with it!" - gross! So we switched it to orange.
Then we got out cups to stack the snow and make geometrical snow men. Well that's a stretch... We made stacks of snow.
I gave Henry some snow to play with. He was not sure what to think about the cold, white stuff. Amazingly, he didn't try to eat it - that's a first. ;)
Cotton ball painting! It's not like we don't have about 20 paintbrushes, but I figured it was something new to try. Plus the cotton ball / clothespin combos fit so nicely in the silicone mold I was using for a paint tray. Even better plus, I could just throw the cotton balls away, so clean-up was super easy!
This one was not from Pinterest, but a new paint set I saw at Target. It's a little foam roller with shapes. It looked so fun! There were stars, flowers and stripes.
He really liked it, but he kept pressing so hard that all he got were rectangular smears of paint. I tried to show him how to make the shapes show up better, but he really likes utilizing some force while painting. As long as he is having fun, who cares?
And the winner by far was the snow spraying! He keeps asking me to so it again, so we did. Henry even got in on the action. Sorta - he just held the bottles and smashed them into the snow. But he was having fun. :)
Plus I made the switch down to the art table. To reach over the side of the container last time, I had to boost Thomas up on a book. Which kept falling and scaring all of us (especially the dogs), so I thought this might work better. I generally prefer to keep him at the table when he is doing art do he can't run away and paint the walls or whatever, so I had to stand guard with both of them. One of these days I might trust them with art supplies, but until them they will remain under lock and key. ;)