Activities With The Girls

I mentioned the dry erase crayons in an earlier blog and found another activity to do with them that the girls absolutely loved! After making sure that the curtains were out of the way we decorated the windows with the crayons. Maybe it was the novelty of drawing on something other than paper but both girls were enthralled with this and clean up was a snap. This would be even better if you had glass patio doors, which would make a much bigger canvas.

Do it Yourself Play Dough

Today we got out the play dough and some plastic cookie cutters and had a ton of fun. It kept both girls busy for over an hour! To keep the mess to a minimum I put an old shower curtain on the coffee table. The dough we used was over a month old and was still soft and pliable when I pulled it out of the fridge. The recipe I used is:
No Cook Play Dough
1/2 cup salt
2 cups flour
2 tbsp oil
2 tbsp cream of tartar
1 1/2 to 2 cups boiling water
Food coloring
All you have to do is mix everything but the food coloring together, then knead until smooth. Add food coloring and knead until thoroughly mixed in.
If you're making more than one color, try to make sure the colors will mix well, or you might wind up with a shade like what you see in the picture. This was originally neon pink, neon green and blue when I first made it.

Dry Erase Crayons

The other day I found a couple of really cool Leapfrog learning games in the dollar bin at Target. I got one for ABC's and one for colors and shapes. They have a spinner on the front, with a worksheet on the back, and since they're laminated they can be used over and over. We already had some washable dry erase markers, but that means that Alicia (1) couldn't use them because she's still in that stage where everything ends up in her mouth, not to mention all over her and everything around her. Jaydra (2) loves markers, just not the part about keeping track of the lids and putting them back on when she's done. Actually she likes to stick the lids on her fingers and pretend she has rainbow nails. Needless to say, markers dry up fast in our house.I saw an ad for these dry erase crayons and thought that there was no way they could wipe off as easily as the markers, but decided to try them anyway. Nothing ventured nothing gained, right?

I bought them for about $3.50 and we tried them out. They actually work pretty well! *As a side note, crayola is not sponsoring this although if they wanted to send me any samples I'd love to try them out.* They come with 8 crayons and a cleaning cloth, which works slightly better than my dry eraser. They also have a sharpener built into the box, which confused Jaydra. She couldn't understand why mommy wanted to make her crayons sharp. To wipe them off, I had to press down a little and they were slightly harder to erase than markers. Dry erase crayons made cleaning up the inevitable collateral damage on the table much easier than it is with normal crayons. Jaydra did a sneak attack on the curtains, and they will definitely mark fabric, but the box says they're washable so I'm really hoping that's true. I'll update about that when the curtains are dry.

*Update* Curtains are as good as new.