crafts and activities – Page 3

{pretty, happy, funny, real} – random pieces of life

Posted on 2016-02-182016-02-18 by kristinabean

The ladies at Like Mother, Like Daughter were encouraging this week’s {phfr} to be about desk space, since an organized and clean desk is such a great jump start for productivity and clear thinking. Unfortunately, my desk is in a very dimly lit room and I didn’t have opportunity during the daylight hours to try to take a picture of it! So in the spirit of the link-up I cleaned and organized the horrible mess that was my desk and then enjoyed getting some HOA work done on the newly-emptied surface. It really does make a difference, having it clean!

{pretty}

We are in the height of citrus season here in the low desert, and my parents have quite a few trees, so on Monday afternoon we took some time to make orange marmalade, candied orange peels, and candied grapefruit peels. The jars in the picture above are of the orange syrup left over from boiling the peels – the flavor is quite strong and sweet and makes a good addition to different types of drinks. I think it would be good with just some sparkling water but my mom has an old-fashioned in mind 🙂 She’s not as much of a lightweight when it comes to alcohol as I am!

{happy}

Our garden has really become a play space. On Tuesday I watched my nephew and niece for a couple hours and they had a great time exploring the dirt and plants in the garden; I’m not sure who slipped this little construction crate under the cilantro, though! It looks like a little elfin summerhouse to me – I can just imagine the little people frolicking in the dappled green light under the leaves, and resting for the night in their hideaway.

{funny}

Because the weather has been so unseasonably warm, our little orange tree has begun budding already. Its branches are beginning to encroach rather significantly into the yard, but it had been trimmed ruthlessly and ignorantly before we bought the house and suffered a lot of sunburn as a result, so we’re giving it a few years to heal before we try to trim it again. So, some of the branches are at just the right height for Limerick to explore, and he’s been quite intrigued by the new flower buds. In fact, he’ll stand at the tree, oblivious to the world, picking all the flower buds off, saying “flower bud!” each time and then dropping them on the ground or into a cup. Some of the fruits (flowers?) of his labor he then put on the edge of the raised bed garden, for no reason known outside of his own small head…

{real}

If I had gotten a “before” picture of my desk, that would have been my {real} picture for the week! I had pre-Christmas decorations, old mail, HOA papers, the remnants of a Christmas craft, some chocolate and essential oils, and some items destined for Goodwill, all piled up on a table no more than 30″ square. Even the “after” picture could be {real}, though, tucked away as the desk is by my husband’s school desk, his weights and bench, the vacuum, and a couple large bookshelves… all of our random things seem to have ended up in the same place, which is also the only way to get into the backyard, so there’s always a bit of chaos going on. But it is cleaner than it was, and that makes me happy 🙂

Go check out the rest of the link-up!

family life

messy play

Posted on 2015-12-182015-12-17 by kristinabean

Sometimes I hate messy play because I’m the one who has to clean it up afterwards. Usually, though, I think it is the best – it engages the boys’ tactile systems in unusual ways, gives them a new or uncommon activity to delve into, and provides them an opportunity to create and imagine with different raw material then they’re used to.

Baking is one of my favorite messy plays because it’s highly edible and somewhat productive as well as being a lot to clean up, but outdoors messy play is also nice – not so tasty, but less work for me at the end.

One of our favorites around here is cloud dough (8 parts flour to 1 part coconut oil), which feels like soft, crumbly, slightly moist, moldable sand. I keep it in a box with a few different types of toys: spoons and cups for scooping and dumping, cookie cutters for molding, and a bulldozer for building. Then I set the box on the back patio (I’ve found there are too many distractions out front) and let the boys explore freely.

They typically play together well – Rondel is fairly good-natured about letting Limerick investigate everything he’s doing, and Limerick isn’t particularly aggressive about it. I think it helps with the cloud dough and similar activities that they don’t have a routine in which some toys are the sole possession of one boy or the other. It is always a joint affair.

And, ultimately, while Rondel is busy using the spoon or the bulldozer shovel to scoop cloud dough into the small buckets and cups, Limerick ends up just eating handfuls of it. (That, incidentally, is why I use an edible oil like coconut oil instead of mineral oil or baby oil like many cloud dough recipes call for. It’s also why I don’t use tempura paint to color it like I might when they are older…)

By the end, the cloud dough was everywhere – in their clothes, in their hair, all over the patio – but they were incredibly happy and so was I. The spilled cloud dough had become an opportunity for the bulldozer to build roads, and I was commissioned to bring out one of the HotWheels cars to drive on said roads. The boy who had been wiping off his fingers every few minutes at the beginning of the activity had cloud dough completely covering his legs and arms and was utterly disregarding it 🙂 So, all in all, a great success!

family life, musings

infant play – stackable cups at the park

Posted on 2015-10-212015-10-24 by kristinabean

It is quite a privilege to watch a very young child playing independently. I brought stackable cups and a random bowl to the park with us and simply set them on the ground to see if the boys would notice or be interested.

The complete focus, the utter absorption into the task the child has created, is a beautiful thing. Limerick had no direction about what to do with those cups: he was able to investigate their properties himself and decide what he wanted to accomplish.

Sometimes it’s tempting to step in and offer a hand, whether to direct their play (so it makes more sense from our adult perspective) or to provide a layer of support and security (so we can ease our own adult anxieties). But though his steps might be shaky, Limerick doesn’t need me right next to him. Letting him walk by himself, as he so very much desires, will strengthen his independence and self-confidence; constantly shadowing him with offers of help will begin to convince him that he is incapable on his own.

In deciding to go get the blue cup and bring it over with the other cups, and in carrying out that task by himself, he learned about planning and execution. He practiced balancing in a myriad of different positions, and began to grasp concepts of distance and the size and reach of his own body. It may look painfully slow to the observer, but his brain was working furiously the whole time to assimilate and respond to all the incoming information.

His estimation was about an inch or so off – I could have reached over and pushed the cup that much closer to him, but instead he was able to discover that if he stretched out just a bit father than he would normally be comfortable with, he could get the cup to roll towards him and would then be able to pick it up.

Finally – success! Cup in hand, he turned and walked back over to his previous play station, where the other cups and bowls were waiting for him. He had set a goal for himself, worked hard to accomplish it, and carried out his plan, without any adult input, interaction, or assistance. The feeling of a job well done, of new skills mastered, is an incredibly positive one, so why would I want to take that away from him by offering unneeded help? Our babies will surprise us with their abilities and intelligence if we give them the opportunity.

It is not, in the long run, helpful for a child for us to be constantly in their space, giving them adult input, direction, and aid; it shuts down their creativity and hampers their development toward independence. It is our silent and somewhat removed presence – there if they do need us, but unobtrusive when they do not – that can be truly empowering for the young child at play.

family life

time together: sensory baking

Posted on 2015-10-192015-10-21 by kristinabean

a cloudy rainy Sunday calls for baking and naps! So Rondel and I made some cardamom-spiced pear bread and wintry oatmeal cookies together while Limerick took a nap with Daddy. It is hard to make time to spend one-on-one with Rondel and this hour or so was really special for both of us.

I brought all the ingredients, utensils, and bowls down to the kitchen floor and together we poured, stirred, cracked eggs, and explored with all our senses! Rondel noticed the difference between how brown sugar and white sugar felt on his hands, and between how they poured out into the mixing bowl. (I measured the sugar out into bowls and let him dump them into the big bowl – my “little” bowls were probably too heavy, though, as he ended up dropping them into the butter.) He felt the difference between the fine powdery baking soda and the coarse grainy salt – and liked the feel of the baking soda so much that he put his whole hand in the box to feel more! He felt the cool smooth pool of vanilla and the cloudy soft pillow of flour. He felt the firm unbroken shell of the eggs, heard the crack as he hit them against the bowl, felt the sharp fragmented edges and the slippery egg white as he tried to pry them open from his little starter hole.

He tasted the oats, dry and chewy, texturally pleasant but rather bland; he tasted the walnuts, cold and crunchy from the freezer; he tasted the cranberries, tart and bright on the tongue; and he tasted the white chocolate chips and didn’t want to stop tasting them! He observed the funny folds and crevices of the walnuts, and used his imagination to see silly cars and trucks and animals in their fantastic shapes. He saw how the white flour disappeared and was absorbed into the dough as we stirred.

And what he didn’t do faded into the background, and we ignored it. Some other day he’ll want to feel the butter, help grease the bread pans, taste the creamy-grainy mix of butter and sugar, and lick the bowl with me. He can grow in his experiences in his own way, and at his own speed, and we can still have one of the best afternoons we’ve had together in a long time.

(I didn’t take any pictures because I didn’t want to step out of the moment with Rondel, so you’ll just have to imagine the cuteness and the mess! Sorry about that!)

family life

baby-safe edible finger paint!

Posted on 2015-10-142015-10-12 by kristinabean

This is probably one of the simplest finger-paint recipes out there (and unfortunately I can’t remember where I first saw it, to give credit for the idea). It takes literally less than a minute to mix up, and is completely safe for the baby who tends to put everything in his mouth.

From what I remember on the original site, it does also dry well on paper, but I just used it on the highchair since only Limerick was playing with it. (Rondel was camped out on the sofa resting off a fever, poor kid).

All you have to do is add some food coloring to sweetened condensed milk and voila! Perfect paint. It has just the right consistency to spread easily without running, and the colors blend together marvelously for another dimension of play and experimentation.

Rondel, with his sensory defensiveness, has never been a fan of messy play like this – he deeply dislikes the feel of anything slimy or sticky on his hands (he will play with drier things like dirt, sand, sidewalk chalk, and crayons, though) – so this is one of my first forays into the world of finger paint. Personally I love finger painting… I love feeling different textures on my fingers and seeing things meld and change as a result of my motions. While I can rationally understand Rondel’s sensitivity and dislike, it is nice to be able to enjoy this sort of thing with Limerick! And he definitely enjoyed it.

The one downside of sweetened condensed milk paint is that it is incredibly sticky. Limerick had to get a shower after this to clean it all up, and I was finding sticky drips of paint on the floor where the high chair had been for hours afterwards, despite my efforts to clean everything thoroughly right away.

The highlight, of course, is that I got to eat some of the condensed milk right out of the can… and lick some off the highchair tray before washing it… and turn the leftovers into hot fudge sauce later… these are much better perks than the cornstarch paint alternatives could possibly afford, and I think they make the stickiness worthwhile 😉