Lucan is having more and more fun doing “activities,” which
is great. He wants to play and interact and use his imagination – all good
things. I know that sometimes it’s easiest to just plop him in the living room
and tell him to play with his toys, but activities that require a little
planning and momma forethought have been really good for us. I’ve been really
thankful for Angela at teachingmama.org for ideas. Angela is one of those
fantastic moms who always has something fun up their sleeves. Me, not so much. Angela
and her family used to attend the same church as us before moving to a new
town. She’s fantastic!
Anywho, Angela is one of my go-to resources for things to do
with Lucan on Saturday mornings. One of the preschool sensory activities that I’ve
seen floating around was Cloud Dough. Two ingredients: flour and oil. Easy
peasy. Angela recommended using baby oil as it smells better. No problem, baby
oil comes cheap and isn’t hard to find (unlike liquid watercolors, another
story for another day). There was a weekday I was home with a sick Lucan (day
two of antibiotics so technically he wasn’t “contagious” so I didn’t feel awful
about dragging him out in public ) so we decided to head out to Wal-Mart to purchase
some art supplies to keep us occupied. Baby oil was an easy addition to our
cart. Much easier than the contemplation that took place in the tempera paint
aisle.
But a batch of cloud dough is ½ cup oil and 4 cups of flour
and then mixing it up with your hands. No problem. Easy. I got a couple of
containers, measuring spoons and a set of silicon ice cube trays (which I
bought over a year ago with the plan to make crayon shapes) for Lucan to use to
play with the cloud dough. He enjoyed it well enough. It wasn’t exactly life
changing, but it was fine. Messy, but fine. We played on the deck so the mess
didn’t really overly concern me.
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| Cloud dough while it was still "dough." |
However problems started later that day when Lucan went out (unsupervised)
to the backyard/deck to play with his water table and water table toys. Generally
speaking, no problem. I can see his water table from our kitchen window while I’m
washing dishes. On this particular day, Lance and I were trying to finish up
some salsa canning and had put our huge vat of canning water out on the deck as
a measure to NOT heat up the house even more. Unbeknownst to me, Lucan started
transporting copious amounts of water using his watering can into the plastic
tub we had used earlier for cloud dough. We all know that flour + water =
paste.
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| Cloud dough as glue paste. Just add water! |
Sticky icky paste. Paste that was everywhere. While I didn’t
have the massive conniption that Lance did (because how much harm can come of
flour paste that’s being played with outside?), I certainly wasn’t happy that
we weren’t going to be able to have a second cloud dough playtime. Lance, on
the other hand, saw the sticky paste that was getting all over our wood deck that
was going to have to be sprayed off with a hose to get rid of the gunk. This is
probably where Lance deemed the cloud dough as the WORSE IDEA EVER. Talk about
drama queen. And people say I have a flair for the dramatic.
So in the future if you want to play with cloud dough, go
for it! Just don’t add water.
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