easy bubbles

Thursday was the latest in what has been a week of whiny screamy days (and nights).  Zoë is cutting teeth which she does with the grace and discretion of a rhinoceros and Jonathan's mouth erupted in canker sores which have been getting worse and making him cry when he eats anything.  We've going through Tylenol and teething tablets like water and still NO ONE around here is sleeping well.  On Thursday Jonathan got up from his nap and collapsed in tears when he bit into his after-nap treat (a soft chocolate candy).  Zoë was in the other room moaning and carrying on because I had set her down while I was getting Jonathan up.  I surveyed the situation- 2 whiny kids and my tired frustration rapidly turning into anger and rising and creeping up from my stomach into my face.  I love them and feel badly about their pain, but there is only so much of that noise- that horrible scratchy dissatisfied whine- I can take and I had reached my limit.  I knew if something didn't happen I would start screaming. And I really didn't want that.  We needed a plan.  Something out of the ordinary that would distract them.   And then I remembered that Jonathan had asked me to fill our star-shaped ice tray with green ice last week and then we had forgotten about it.  PERFECT.

I dug out a clear plastic bin that was just big enough that Zoë wouldn't be able to dump it over once it was full of water and filled it about 5 inches deep with warm water.  I plopped the ice onto a plate, and scrounged the cabinets for a few toys.   Zoë is in a dumping phase- as in dumping everything onto her head- and so I was looking for anything that wouldn't hold water well enough to be dumped.  I ended up with 2 whisks and 2 small sieves out of the cabinet.

Viola.  Entertainment until the ice was melted- 5 minutes.

With the ice melted and they started migrating away from the bin.  NOOO.  5 minutes was NOT enough distracted time to break our funk.  Desperately I tried and an idea I vaguely remembered from pinterest- dishsoap.  I squired in 3 squirts and used the whisk to churn the water and we were back in business.

Green water with oodles of bubbles.  It was a hit.  They played for a good 20 minutes together.  Enraptured and occasionally giggling and NOT whining or needing to be held.  Then Jonathan ran to the other room to get our entire collection of plastic animals and they spend at least 10 more minutes playing hide-and-seek with the animals under the bubbles.

So easy for so much fun and 30 minutes of mental break time for me.  Not a lot has gone right this week- but this got me through Thursday!  

dino sensory tub

We picked up a book on dinosaurs from the library a week or so ago.

I wouldn't qualify it as a great book, but it had some good information about dinos woven into its slightly awkward story, and it was good enough to elicit 20 or requests for it to be read by our little man.  Since I've been wanting to revamp our sensory bin for a while, so I used it as a launching point for a new set-up.

I cleaned out the rice and lentils that have been living with some small dump trucks and bulldozers in our under the bed storage box for the past year or so.  (I saved the rice/lentil mix in some ziplocks to be used later) and the box was now usable for a dinosaur habitat.

I dumped a bit of sand from our sand-box in with our dinos and then collected a bunch of other stuff for Jonathan to add or not as part of his play:

I mixed up some mud-playdough by using this recipe and adding some instant coffee to the water for color. (I think next time I would use food color since the coffee gave it sort of a funky, musty smell).  I put out a tub of way out of date couscous that has been haunting the back shelves of our pantry, some leaves, some pine cones, a cut-up egg carton, and an easter egg with a small lizard inside (to hatch as a baby dino).

When he woke up from his nap, I read the dinosaur book to him again and then told him that I had a special project for him to build a habitat for the dinosaurs to live.  He was excited to have new things in the bin and spent a long time using the play-dough and sand alone and then gradually incorporated each of the other elements.  When he was done he was so proud of it that he would show it to anyone who came over and refused to move the elements around more- he just wanted to talk about what the dinos were doing and eating and how the t-rex looked scary, but was actually friendly.

making his own magic

One of my favorite mommy-blogs is always going on and on about play-dough.  She has bagillions of recipes for various colors, scented play-dough, play-dough with glitter, etc.  It always looks amazing.  And her little girls are always doing amazing and creative things with it.  But the problem is that my little boy isn't wild about play-dough the way her little girls are.  He likes it fine- once and a while- mostly for mashing and smashing.  But doesn't ever seem to notice the color or the scent (boy-girl thing?  who knows).  It just doesn't capture his imagination and creativity.

But recently he has started getting interested in leggos- and I see that same creative spark and imaginative play emerging.

I love watching him play with his leggos- tongue out, full body concentration.

From the beginning I have tried to steer clear of toys that whiz and bang and play songs.  At first it was out of a selfish desire to not hear all of those obnoxious noises over and over and over and over and over.  But as I have watched Jonathan grow without them, I am really glad that he is learning to make his own magic with simpler toys.  Imagining garbage-trucks out of cardboard boxes and a boat out of the laundry basket requires him to learn how to stir up his own creativity in a way that banging on his ball-popper doesn't.  And, for him, leggos are a great outlet for imaginative play.

We build a lot of vehicles- airplanes, cars, trains.  And a lot of things to be knocked down or crashed.  (The slide has become the crash-test location of choice.)

And while I still help him a bit with the original creations, he is usually able to play "mechanic" after the crashes!

dirt

One of my favorite things about spring is the chance to dig in the dirt and start new things.  This spring I decided to re-work the garden format and in doing so dig up a substantial bit of the yard near our patio.

It is perhaps an overly ambitious plan, but I'm too far in now to pull out.  And so this week when we had a sunny, beautiful afternoon, I decided to embrace this chaos as an opportunity to make do with what we have- dirt.

I love dirt.  There is just something so freeing and wonderful about plunging your hands into it and feeling its earthiness between your fingers.  Or toes. I love watching sand slip between my fingers, and the squelchy noises mud makes, and the smell of the soil after a rainstorm.  And as I've gotten older and more nerdy, I love it for the way it provides nourishment for plants and for the amazing ecosystem that is there, hiding under our feet and sustaining life as we know it.  There is simply nothing like good, clean fun in the dirt.

So as we were unpacking the lunch-boxes, backpacks, cars-eats, and water-bottles from the car,  I mustered up the most excited voice I could and said "Jonathan, do you know what is in the backyard?"  He mirrored my enthusiasm with his "What?!" and I replied "DIRT!!!!"  "Wow!" "Do you want to go PLAY IN IT?!?!?"  "YEAH!!!!" and he started dancing around with his excitement (his excited dance is one of my favorite things about 2 1/2).

So we put the sleeping baby in a shady spot, and got out the shovel and rake and plunged in.

We found worms and centipedes and rolly-pollys and rocks.  We pulled out tufts of grass and examined their roots.   Jonathan discovered how to make dirt clods explode when you squeeze them.    We stopped short of hosing the dirt pile down and making a mud-pit, but at the rate my project is progressing, there will be more afternoons in the dirt!

ice fish

Almost two years ago I picked up a fish ice tray at IKEA.  It seemed like it had so much potential to be used in a creative, fun way with a toddler.  And for the past two years, I have been trying to figure out how to use it for something fun with Jonathan.  Last weekend it dawned on me to make ICE in it.  Imagine- ice in an ice tray.

But the idea, as obvious as it wasn't in my poor little brain, turned out to be superb.  I filled the try on Friday night- water + one drop of food color in each fish.  And then, after breakfast, I filled an empty plastic container (this one had spinach originally, I think) with warm water and voila- crazy fun for about 10 minutes.

He had no idea what they were at first- I just told him it was a surprise and let him explore.  Jonathan loved watching them melt and seeing the colors swirl in the water.

Seeing the moment that their tails melted off was also a hit.

He was delighted as the water got murkier and murkier and kept asking where the fish had gone.  It was like magic!

He could have thrown 100 fish into that water and not gotten tired of it.  So once we ran out, I let him fill it again with a teaspoon and we put it back in the freezer for after nap-time.  Hours went by between our fish adventure and nap time- snacks, stories, play, lunch, etc. And when he woke up from his nap?  The first words out of his mouth were: Where are the fish?!?!  Awesome.  We did this about 5 times over the course of the weekend and he loved it as much each time.

Snow!

Where we live, snow is a rare thing.  So when flakes started falling yesterday around dinnertime, it was a BIG deal- Jonathan and I sat and watched flakes for a long time.  And when we woke up this morning, the ground was covered with a thin sheet of snow.

When Jonathan peeked out of the window and saw it, he was so excited he started dancing wildly around the kitchen.

Then he looked me straight in the eyes and said.  "There is snow!!  It must be wintertime today!" Indeed.  With his logic, this probably our day of winter this year.  So as soon as breakfast was over, we bundled up and headed out.  

Jonathan reveled in running and hearing his shoes crunch in the still air, I reveled in the cold blue sky and the way winter makes long shadows on the new white.  Zoë was a good sport.

We didn't last long out in the cold.  But you have to seize the moment around here- because the snow was gone by lunchtime.  

new sensory bowl

This weekend I finally got around to doing some creative hands-on fun at home.  Life has been so insane the past 3 weeks, that I have really been dragging in the afternoons.  We play pretend games about hiding in bear caves and airplanes and garbage trucks and he gets his hands dirty helping me cook dinner most nights, but I haven't had the energy to pull out the paints or play-dough or do a fun project for a while.  So on Friday I treated myself to a 30 minute, $5 field trip to the dollar store to pick up some fun.   I filled my bag with mardi-gras beads, cotton balls, tiny shiny bows, colored shredded paper, and a new big bowl.  I got home, cut up the necklaces, dumped, added a cardboard tube- and viola! a new sensory tub waiting for Jonathan to wake up from his nap.

He loved it.  He immediately dumped it out on the table and began filling the tube, sorting the beads, and squishing the paper and cotton balls.  It kept him fascinated and experimenting for a full hour!! 

Just love that rapt concentration!  And he kept asking to take it out again all weekend. He referred to it as "that surprise thing that Mommy made for me".  

change of pace

Jonathan's favorite thing right now is garbage trucks.  And when a two and a half year old has a favorite thing, it means that it will permeate everything they do.  For example, during breakfast he will start insisting that his spoon is a trash can as he is dumping his oatmeal into his mouth (the trash truck).  We watch videos on youtube of real trash trucks and of other children playing with toy trash trucks (I'm actually becoming quite fond of the little song, but Daddy finds it less fascinating).

He has commandeered three of my plastic flower pots and deemed them trash cans.  He fills them with toys and then dumps them into a large cardboard box- the trash truck- again, and again, and again.  This game has completely engaged him for 90% of his waking hours now going on three weeks.  And while it has endless fascination to him, playing it in 4 hour stretches day after day after day is making Mommy and Daddy go a little bit crazy.

So yesterday I decided that during nap-time I would take action.  Stealing an idea from one of my favorite mommy blogs, I hid the flowerpots and the box and instead set out a big wad of play-dough and little bowls filled with fall leaves, dry pasta, glass pebbles, and pieces of shells we collected at the beach.

The idea was to use these prompts to create some mixed-media sculpture.  And the goal was to have some time dedicated to playing together with him in a creative way that we both enjoyed.

So when I got him up from his nap, I told him I had a surprise downstairs to play with.  He loves surprises and was so full of anticipation that I could barely change his diaper.  And when he saw the set-up he was hooked. He spent a long time simply putting his fingers into each bowl, picking up handfuls of each and then putting them back in the bowl.  He got very upset when I tried to take anything out of the bowls or to play with the play-dough.

I tried to model some sculptures, but this usually ended in him saying "No Mommy, that is not how you play with this" and then him dis-assembling my art.

Eventually he dumped all of the bowls out onto the table and then spent time sorting all of the items back into their proper bowls.

  

He never did get into the idea of sculpting with the play-dough or sticking stuff into it; but he did a lot of sorting.  Eventually he decided that the bowls were trash trucks, needing to be filled.  But overall it was a success.  We had a glorious hour of non-trash-truck play and a little exploration of something novel.  Today we are back to trash trucks.

Here Fishy Fishy Fishy

Jonathan has been amazing me lately with how his imagination is getting more and more extensive. A few days ago he was playing with his toy fishing rod on the sofa. He had arranged all of his fish on the floor beneath him and was laying on the sofa attempting to catch them with his toy fishing rod/hook.

When he had caught them all, he announced that he needed to cook them. Something along the lines of "I need to take the fish home to bake. Mommy! Get me a pan!" So I obliged and next thing I knew he had his cutting food out and was cutting up carrots and tomatoes to put in the pan along with the fish. I asked if he needed anything else for the soup and he said "Umm, I think it needs some spices".

He stirred it and cooked it and kept tasting it and adding more chili powder until he announced that it was ready and we needed some bowls. He carefully poured it into bowls and gave one to me and then "ate" one himself.

I loved that he had worked out the whole scene from catching the fish to cooking them to serving the soup in bowls with virtually no input from me!

Hot Summer Days

It has been HOT here for the past few days. The kind of hot and humid that makes me sweat just thinking about opening the door. But with a kiddo who cannot get enough of playing outside- I choose outside over tantrums and never ending whining even on horrid days. So on days when the pool is closed, we bring the water fun to our own backyard!

Messy Fun

How much fun can you have with $1.29?

a LOT.

I promised Jonathan painting this morning, but when it came time, I couldn't find our paint. Alas. I swallowed hard, and broke out a rainy-day idea I'd run across a few weeks ago despite my fear of how much of a mess it would be.

I expected it to take a little bit of encouragement to get my neat-freak boy to be comfortable putting his hands in such gooey stuff. But I sprayed some shaving cream on a cookie sheet and by the time I could pick up my camera, he was off and running!

A few minutes in he did stop to declare "Oh no!! Big Mess!" But then dove right back in!

We added some food coloring,

Got some in our hair,

and had a great time!

Yes, there was shaving cream everywhere. I took his chair out and hosed it off along with our painting table-cloth and the pan. But now, aside from a faint clean scent, the evidence of our mischief is gone! This may be a better outdoor activity once it warms up, but it was certainly great fun!!

indoor fun

Over the past few weeks, a number of bugs have been going around our house and have left all of us just feeling exhausted. Jonathan has been taking 3 hour naps at home and asking to go to bed early. And we've been right behind him!! That plus the cold weather and a snow day has meant that we've had to improvise and be creative to stay entertained in the house all day. Here are some pics from our exploits...

I cut up an old sweet potato to make stamps- the triangle and square were easy, the circle took more work. Jonathan loved banging them from the paint pan onto the paper and was very excited to point out the shapes and then count them ( as in "one, two, free, six triangles!").

Then, during snack time, I realized that his chex-mix contained bits of circles, squares, and triangles. So I pulled out the his paintings and he matched the corresponding snack shapes with his paintings.

Yesterday I got this idea from another blog and mixed together a bunch of almost empty pantry wares- a few tablespoons each of a bunch of kinds of rice and lentils and barley. Then I collected some various plastic containers and scoops and put it all in a 9x13 pan. This was the jackpot. It kept Jonathan raptly entertained for over an hour. (though it did require some major sweeping later)

Making play-dough is on our list next!