Wading and Water Play

Last week the weather around here was gorgeous. Temperatures were in the high 70s and it was sunny. We have a park about a three minute drive from our house that has a creek running through it and I decided this year was the right year to scramble down the hill and let the children play in the creek.

We went to the store and bought a wide variety of inexpensive toys that would make for fun play in a creek. Off the top of my head that meant buckets, watering cans, small shovels and rakes, colanders, turkey basters, big kitchen stirring spoons, a small plastic dump truck, etc. I also picked up a small laundry basket to dump all the wet toys into at the end of play to stick in the back of the minivan. And of course, there was the first pair of rain boots/wading boots my children have owned. Boy were they excited about the boots.

Ava was tentative. After briefly testing the water at a depth of about one inch she decided to stick to the shore. Before letting Michael go, I explained that he should only go in until the water reached to about two inches below the top of his boots. I got his attention. I looked him in the eye. I pointed to the two inch from the top spot on his boots. Then I set him free. He loved it. He went further and further in. I just let him. When he had reached the point at which I could see the water pouring into the tops of his boots I inquired, from my sunny spot on the bank of the creek, "Sweetheart, do you notice anything about your boots?" He looked towards me is puzzlement and replied, "Huh?" So I told him, "Nevermind," and just let him go.

I always seem to learn the hard way...

Lesson Learned the Hard Way: Number One

So, recently my husband and I bought our first ever high end vacuum cleaner. We'd been making do on the $40 sale upright I'd gotten in college. I don't even like cleaning, but I was excited. We did our first room and loved watching the bin fill up an embarrassing number of times in just that first room.

The next morning the children went to preschool and I was still excited enough about the new vacuum cleaner to decide that spending some of my precious "me" time vacuuming was recreational in nature and I moved on to the berber carpet in the living room. I was humming along happily vacuuming when I met my first snag. Someone really should have warned me about what would happen when high-end vacuum cleaner meets an exposed loop in a berber carpet. A fraction of a second was all it took and I ended up with this:

At first I simply stared at the torn carpet and tried to process exactly what had happened. Then I tipped back the vacuum cleaner and stared in amazement at the long piece of carpet wound around the beater bar. Then I texted my husband because I couldn't stand being amazed all by myself. Finally I removed the pulled up carpet from the beater bar saving it so that my husband could appreciate it too when he came home and resumed vacuuming.

Because I want you all to think that I have a super fast learning curve I won't mention that after cleaning up all the mess from the first snag I promptly went over a second loop in the carpet and repeated the entire mistake causing an additional strip of torn carpeting. At that point, I did take a pair of scissors and go over the carpet on my hands and knees to trim any remaining snags before finishing vacuuming.

I suppose I could be upset about it, but in the big scheme of things, there are so many "better" things to spend that mental energy on that I'd just rather see the humor in the situation. I didn't like that carpet much anyway. And the two new rips will match the ketchup stain from the day I let the children eat in front of the tv nicely.

Lesson Learned the Hard Way: Number Two

So, cloud dough is amazing stuff. It is inexpensive, easy to make from two ingredients you have around the house, smells nice, and is fun to play with.

Do not, under any circumstances, put it in an outdoor sensory table.

Oh, sure, it all looks beautiful and pristine in the picture. And yes, the children did play in it happily for over an hour. But then I forgot it in the rush to make lunch and get the children down for nap. To make things worse, I hadn't even put the top on the sand table. And then it rained. Flour, oil, and now water were in the sand table.

I might have rescued the situation had I noticed and dealt with it at that point, but we had several busy days. So it sat there in the hot sun for another couple of days and then got some more rain. Then I went out on the deck yesterday and it was the smell that hit me first. It's really difficult to describe. Fermenting maybe? And so not in a good way. And it was a paste that was just stuck to the many surfaces of the sand table. It took at least a couple of hours of work to clean that mess up. And we had to toss all the sand on the other side because the children, blissfully unaware of how nasty it was, managed to mix a bunch of the fermented cloud dough in with the sand.

I think I can still smell that stuff on my hands. From now on, the cloud dough is exclusively an indoor activity.

Lessons learned. My personal theme of the week.

Homemade Dough Stamps

I made these with a glue gun and recycled tops from single serve chocolate milk bottles (from fast food restaurants). We had six caps, so I sat down with the kids and a piece of paper and we planned our six designs. They each got to choose three. We ended up with square, pumpkin, smiley face, triangle, snowflake, and flower. Then I made the designs on the tops of the lids with the glue gun and we let them set for 24 hours. (I also did some designs on cardboard rolls, but those didn't work as well.)

We made some cloud dough the next day from flour and baby oil and the kids used the stamps. They really enjoyed using the stamps and they worked fairly well. (Cloud dough takes 5 minutes to make and is wonderful to play with. If you haven't tried it you definitely should.)