I'm not terribly good at the whole play thing, even less so when I'm in pain and heavily pregnant.  The only upside is that when I do set up some kind of sensory or messy play The Spawn think it's amazing.

Thing One is out on his surprise early birthday celebration at Blackpool Pleasure Beach for the day with The Husband and Thing Two is having a sleep over at The Grandparents to minimise sulking.  So that just leaves The Preschooler and I.  He has a huge capacity for in-depth independent play pausing only for snacks, cuddles, a chat and a bit of tv yet even still he misses fighting like cat and dog with his siblings when they're not here.  So today seemed the perfect time for him to finally take part in The Great Ice Rescue, something that's been in the freezer for best part of a week.

It's incredibly easy to set up.  I grabbed a roasting tin and plonked a load of figures in it such as Moshlings, dinosaurs, fairies and other such things then poured over water mixed with blue food colouring.  This was then put in the freezer and left.  Granted, The Spawn are nosy little gits and kept opening the drawer to peek so I now have a rather fetching blue freezer drawer too.

So The Preschooler could manipulate it easier I plonked it upside down on the path and poured a jug of warm water over the roasting tin so that it lifted off, essentially leaving a frozen block with plenty of people trapped inside.

The Preschooler is crazy about rescuing things and being a hero so he was told his mission, that all these things had been trapped in a big ice storm and only he can save them.  He was given a medicine syringe, a small measuring scoop, a wooden meat tenderising hammer and a jug of warm water.  The rules were given that he wasn't allowed to just tip the jug of water over the ice block it had to be added bit by bit and that he could only smash the hammer gently to avoid hurting his fingers and flying ice.

Seeing as i'm pretty much useless physically at the moment I was able to just sit on a chair outside near him and watch.  We talked about how things freeze and we talked about how things melt.  He got to physically see it happen as he was making it happen.  He experimented and found that without trying to melt the ice a little with water first the hammer didn't do much, yet the more water he added the easier the hammer could break through the ice.  He naturally manipulated the freed yet still ice encased toys and gently hacked away at the ice whilst realising if he dunked them in the jug it came away easier.

I feared he'd grow bored before the ice even started to melt enough to rescue anything as obviously hot water would have been too hazardous so he only had warm water at his disposal yet he was fascinated and very determined.  You could virtually see the knowledge of the melting process and logistics of freeing things flow through him as he played.  I loved how he spoke to them Fireman Sam style and how he naturally adjusted his strength and dexterity between the brazen hammer smashing and the more delicate chiseling.

Naturally his favourate part was the hammer and once everyone had gained their freedom he set about smashing the remaining ice to smithereens with huge delighted whoops and shouts of 'SMASHHHHHHH!'

All in all this was such a simple activity and yet he thoroughly enjoyed it.  It was learning, problem solving, role play and sensory play all in one.  It was virtually mess free (though i'm sporting attractive blue ankles from splashes of melted ice!) as it was all outside too and minimal clearing up as the ice will just melt away.

Definitely one to try again in the future.

Fun With Water Beads

If there's one thing the local town has in abundance, it's pound shops.  They appear to be everywhere.  I'll admit to rather liking them at times, obviously some are considerably more palatable than others.  Some are a sweaty dark caverns of doom with over stacked shelves looming over you with tit and tat that you'll never need yet judging by the price you convince yourself you might need it, someday.  Yet others are simply bargain central.  I can't for the life of me remember the name of it yet there's one in particular that is light, airy, tidy and well presented.  The perfect stop for those pesky hairslides that Thing Two inevitably loses, all the time.  I refuse to fork out extortionate amounts for them when I can get 30 for £1!  Their six packs of baby flannels make excellent reusable nappy wipes and it's a little haven for cheap craft and art bits and bats for The Spawn.  It also means, after a boring shopping trip we can afford to treat The Preschooler.  He easily finds something he'd like in there every single visit and at a pound a pop, why not?

On our last visit there I was drawn to something I've been tempted to try for some time, water beads!  I'm not one for popping into florist supply shops on a whim and I never quite got round to ordering them online so this seemed almost like an omen.  I'll admit to being a trifle suspicious at what we'd get for a £1 so the skeptical side of me purchased two boxes just in case.

It's a rather simple process, you simply add the minuscule little packets of colourful doo-dahs to water.  They came with their own test tubes with the suggestion you fill it with a colour of your choice.  Sod that.  It would be akin to picking out a particular colour from cake sprinkles.  Never to do something by halves we opted instead to dump both packs into a large bowl of water.  The idea is you then observe as they grow.    I'm never quite sure who has the least spectacular attention span, myself or The Preschooler, regardless, neither of us were bored enough to stare at a bowl of water for longer than a few minutes.  Granted they did grow, yet they seemed to stop producing a deflated 'is that it?!' reaction from the both of us.  To say it was underwhelming would be an understatement.  I decided to give them the benefit of the doubt as the instructions have no indication as to how long it should take for them to expand fully.

We checked on their progress about an hour or so later and this was more liking to what I had expected, we
had a slimy bowl of multicoloured marble sized balls in water.  It's impossible to gaze upon them and not plunge your hand into them.  There is something creepy yet utterly satisfying about the slippery slime of the water and these slippery balls.  Granted the little buggers like escaping and they're an arse to pick up off the floor.





Their charm proved irresistible to Thing Two also.  She couldn't stop herself from plunging her hand into them.  In her usual effortless way she encouraged play through asking The Preschooler to find certain colours to make 'potions' as I introduced some measuring cups and the test tubes.

Seeing water slop all over the show I drained the beads so they had the shiny, glistening, oddly textured little balls of delight to play with, without the added mess of water.  This proved equally as satisfying to them and just as beguiling.  I feared they'd have a limited attraction, a mere novelty yet they audibly groaned when I told them it was time to tidy up and the first thing Thing Two requested to play with upon arriving home from school today was the water beads.






They are tempting though.  Just a mere glance of them is teasing to the senses.  I'll admit to having dunked
by hand into them on several occasions today in passing.

I think they'd look stunning over a lightbox in a dark room.  They'd also be more engaging with a longer shallower tub to hold them in.

These are sublime for sensory play and are helpful in teaching colours and the notions of absorbing and expanding. If you haven't tried them already, I highly recommend you give them a go.

Pavement paint

Having seen the term 'Sidewalk paint' bandied about the internet or a while now, I finally found myself   sinking low enough in sanity to actually make the stuff.

You'll find oodles of recipes online for this stuff that all seem to spin off of the same basic ingredients:

* Cornflour (I used one cup)
* Water (I used one cup)
* food colouring (I had some red, yellow and blue so just made various shades through mixing these)

* Bun tray

Piece of piss, you just add the cornflour and water together, decant into a bun tray then add drops of food colouring to each one.

Voila.  Now stand back and admire all the pretty colours (then grimace at your stained hands if you're even half as cackhanded as me)

Let loose your Spawn.

Pro's:

* It's cheap
* Uses ingredients that most o us have in our store cupboard or else are very easily attainable.
* It's washable, you can hose down the pavement afterwards and it'll all disappear or if you're lazy like me, just wait or it to rain.
* As it's an outdoor activity, your kitchen is saved from desecration.

Cons: 

* Yellow food colouring makes your nails look like you smoke 100 a day.  Grim.
* If you let a 3 year old and a 6 year old play at the same time with it, the three year old will mix all the colours up and the 6 year old will get pissed off at this. doh!

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?

Cloud Dough

Very rarely, I'll get most overcome with that awful mothers guilt thing and randomly decide to do something somewhat different with the little cretins, who usually are bloody good at just playing.  Unlike me, I'm crap at playing (unless it involves dressing up, as an elf. Oh do behave! not in the bedroom) and despite being a domestic slattern of the first degree, I'm actually desperately squiffy at the thought of messy play.

It's even a rare event to get paints out here, they have free access to pens and crayons etc but paint is an entirely different ball game, especially as The Toddler appears to lose interest after five minutes anyway.

So, at some point today I lost the threads of my fraying sanity and decided to make some 'cloud dough', i'm sure if you have a lunchtime fling with Google you'll be inunindated with recipes and ideas for this ...erm...stuff.

It's terribly simple to make, at it's most basic you need two ingredients from your store cupboard, flour and oil (any cooking oil will do, even baby oil)

I used 6 cups of flour and 1 cup of oil.  You simply combine them that really is all there is to it.  I told you it was simple.  I added some yellow food colouring with some perverse nod to to the weather, thinking we'd have our own beach play despite the snow and ice outside.

It will look like a rather lumpy dough, not to worry, this is exactly how it's supposed to look.  No really.  I'm absolutely not shitting you.

However, when you touch it (unfortunately a necessity. Balls.) it has the feel of wet sand, if it wasn't for the fact it gets under my nails and into my jewelry the texture would have been delightfully cathartic to play with)  The Toddler found it fiendishly exquisite or at least he did after I managed to encourage him to not be a wuss like me and do away with the spoon.

With the aid of a pot it was sand castle time!  He remained rather conservative with his efforts at first, yet soon lost all sense of reservation and it was cloud dough everywhere, and I mean everywhere.  This alien creation in our abode was so enticing that even Thing Two begged to play

I was decidedly impressed with the longevity of it's attention holding spell, it was nigh bewitching to them, which almost made it worth while.  Yes, almost   Remember me saying it was messy?  That was a horrific understatement, the bloody stuff gets everywhere.  I even found the wretched stuff on my jeans clad arse.  How? Clothes, floor you name it it had been utterly cloud doughed.  Thing Two tried to escape for a wee, treading it all over the carpet en route.  Argh.  What a catastrophe.  It was even in The Toddlers eyebrows.  So operation clean up involved stripping them both down and me sweeping and wiping whilst it seemed to breed and multiply before my very eyes with The Toddler helpfully singing 'clean up, clean up, everybody clean up!' only everybody wasn't cleaning up, just me. Finally an  impromptu bath, sometimes it really is the easiest option.

Did they love it? absolutely.  Was it easy to make? Ridiculously so.  Cheap? cheap as chips. Would I make it again?  Are you shitting me? Maybe once a year, with them in the nud, outside, at someone elses house.  Possibly.

I think in future a little more planning may be a good idea, perhaps one for summer and the garden.  That's the entirety of my creative maternal inspiration exhausted for another few months now.  Even i'm not masochistic enough to do messy play routinely, afterall that's what The Grandparents and (eventually) Nursery are for, right?