This Week

I seem to be apologising a lot recently for not keeping up with posts. Illness is to blame this week; bear has had an awful cold and I have had 2 migraines. So, to be honest, we haven't done very much this week. We played with some chalk and went to the park a few times, and that's about it!

Hopefully normal service will be resumed next week.

Oh, I've done pretty well with planning lunches though - we've had leftovers 3 times and scrambled egg.

What we've been doing Wednesday

Helping to tidy up

Working on fine motor skills with chalk

Watering the plants. Sort of.

Painting

I've been meaning to try painting with little bear for a while and finally did it. It wasn't a huge success but, as with every activity, I need to offer it a few times before he becomes interested.

The recipe I have is 2 cups of cornflour, mixed with 1 cup of cold water and then 4.5 cups of boiling water added one at a time and stirred in between. It looked like it would make a lot of paint so I halved the recipe, which was plenty. It is quite thick, good for finger painting.

I used the gel colours I got from amazon and took great pleasure in matching the colour to the bowls! I calculated how much this cost and it is approximately 32p (30p for the cornflour and pennies of food colouring).

Little bear didn't want to put his hands in the paint but did with a little 'encouragement' from me. In the last week, he has really got the hang of eating with a spoon so enjoyed using the paintbrush and the spoon I'd brought out to put the left over paint into jars.

I'm hoping that the paint will keep in these jars (that I got free off Facebook) as it would be a waste to just throw it away. It went a bit solid while it was out, the texture of set custard, but with a good stir, it was liquid again albeit with some extra lumps.

Update: it's 3 days since I made the paint. It separated in the jar but was a fine texture after being shaken. However, it does smell a bit so I probably wouldn't recommend keeping it more than a few days. Today's session was a bit more successful as I provided more spoons, and little bear put his hand in the orange, which means there are orange smears on everything (which is why I did this outside!)