Island Mama

It’s January, yes. It’s winter, yes.

But it’s mild, and it feels like so much spring, and we all needed to spend some time outside. We worked hard this morning, gathering branches and transporting them (in the truck, the boys love that part!) to the other end of the yard. I even managed to resist the urge to weed the floor of the little forest (the creeping blackberries, they take over!).

After lunch, we burned.

And the boys painted rocks. It keeps them out of the fire, you know.

Luckily we have an almost endless supply of them, because they can both paint a lot.

Some of Timothy’s works of art:

And some of Ben’s:

The rocks will be strewn about the little forest, making paths or hiding in bushes. Maybe I will have to weed after all.

We even got a little garden prep done. Timothy helped me weed and turn over last year’s garlic bed in preparation for planting out the strawberry runners.

We were having a frustrating morning. We were all getting grumpy with each other. We needed to go do something different.

I put a long piece of easel paper down on the ground and we splattered paint on it.

My idea was to run some of our outside cars and trucks around in it to see the wheel prints.

But that didn’t last long….. and then the shoes came off.

And my goodness did they have fun with their feet!!

And their hands. It quickly turned into a full body experience.

And after the first three sheets were filled, they wanted to do it again.

Inspired by the book The Creative Family, which I received last week, I decided to try wet felting with the boys. I already had loads of colored wool from my recent adventures in needle felting, so we got out some bowls of warm soapy water, lots of towels, and started dipping and rubbing balls of wool.

It was much harder to actually make balls than I expected, but we had fun anyway. Even Timothy enjoyed playing with the warm water and eventually, bored with the wool, he found some of his plastic spoons somewhere and before I knew it, it had turned into a dishwashing game…

Inspired, again, by something I read.

Required:

Place a paper plate inside the salad spinner, pour a few blobs of paint on, and spin!

Pretty plates. I think we ended up with 6 or 7.

And this is what it does to the inside of the salad spinner. We used washable, non-toxic tempera paint, though, and it was actually really easy to clean up. (Ben loves doing dishes too, so it was like part of the fun, even!)