The catastrophic delight of mess.

Whilst attempting to distract Thing Two from The Wobbly Tooth (prior to it's removal) and with Thing One out on a mission with The Husband I swallowed by better judgement and decided to to messy play, for the second day in the row.  My masochism apparently has no limits.

First on todays list was to attempt bubble dough.  Easy peasy two ingredients.  You literally need cornflour and washing up liquid (or any liquid soap will do)  You squirt the soap and add cornflour combining them until you get a dough like substance.  The beauty of it is it looks gooey, only it isn't.  Tremendously strange!  It's squishy yet smooth, stretchy yet easily breaks too.  I can only liken it to bubblegum. However, in typical craft inept style, ours didn't quite appear as it did on the link, it seemed too sticky then too brittle and so we cast it aside with the vague idea of experimenting with different quantities another day.  At least it smells nice.




Feeling a trifle disappointed at that experiment, with two eager beavers expecting something fun, I held my breath and got the paints out, stood aside, thinking of Gin.  Lots of Gin. With Gin on top.

One of the problems with trying to teach The Toddler to use both sides of a sheet of paper is that it's rather difficult to then retract that rule, cue The Toddler trying to paint on both sides of the paper, although we must commend his frugal and earth friendly gesture, I can't say my twitching mentality was awfully thrilled with it.

Finding a momentary lapse in their enthusiasm, I seized the moment and ruthlessly cleared the paints away. I didn't hide the rest of the blank paper, honest.

I can only explain our final messy activity of the day as a momentary lapse in judgement, also known as temporarily being out of my bloody mind. Whatever possessed me, I do not know.

Sensory messy play with shaving foam.  Trying to be lazy and smart at the same time, I sloppily envisaged covering a roasting tray with cling film in order to minimise clean up.  I should have known this would have been utterly and totally futile.  Trust me, you really ought not to bother.  This will be messy.  Accept it.  Take your medication and remember, it will be bedtime soon.

So we filled the roasting tin with shaving foam then sprinkled food colouring onto it and let Thing Two and The Toddler have a jolly good time mixing it all up swirling the colours together through this alien substance they'd not encountered before.

That was just stage one of this stimuli.  I kidnapped some of The Toddlers dinosaurs and much to their astonishment unceremoniously dumped the unsuspecting buggers into the colourful foamy mess. The Spawn stopped, stared and contemplated just how out of my mind I had become and to exactly what depth of crazy I was inhabiting. Can you tell the poor deprived gitlings don't get to partake in spontaneous messy play often?  With trepidation at first they poked at the mess with their hands and seeing that I seem to have momentarily restrained myself and bound my better judgement they dived in with gusto relishing the sensations.  So imagine their delight when I then had the ridiculous idea of filling a bowl with water to allow them to wash the dinosaurs, turning the bowl of water into a sloppy murky foam infested mess that they could then blindly fish around for the dinosaurs only to transfer them back into the foam pit.  Oodles of fun.  It was some new kind of wonderful watching their inhibitions melt away as they became consumed by play.  I even managed not to growl or snarl (too much) when things went incredibly slippy, sploshy and splashy all over the pissing floor. Gah.  I think my palms still bare the crescent marks of my nails.

This is an activity I would definitely never ever even contemplate attempting this with all three spawn. There is simply not enough sedatives in the world to ever enable me to allow that to happen.

I think i'm safe to assume that this was indeed their favourate activity, they even found glee in being asked to take the dinosaurs to the bathroom and give them a rinse whilst I attempted to salvage the kitchen and not for the first time that day pondered taking up smoking again.

All for the bargain price of 59p for the shaving foam.

I knew my sanity was worthless, but 59p? really?