What We Do All Day

In my attempt to find ways to pass the hours until bedtime, excuse me, provide enriching learning experiences for my children, we have been having some disastrous fun. Thursday we ventured to the store to buy all the ingredients to make homemade play dough. Lots of flour, food coloring, kook-aid mix and cream of tartar. Why is cream of tartar so expensive?! I think I spent $15 on just that stuff alone!...So, after lunch we began our little activity. All three boys helped dump and mix. Patrick insisted that I add a TON of the kool-aid mix so that our play dough would be extra blue and extra stinky. I read that adding kool-aid mix would give it a "nice" smell, but I beg to differ. Our play dough smelled a little too wild grape for me!! Maybe because we added a ton of mix, I don't know. But, we "cooked" our play dough and let it cool during nap time. I just tried to survive sitting in a house smelling like cooked wild grape. Yuck!

My first attempt at homemade play dough. Lessons learned: lots of flour and little boys don't mix. My kitchen ended up looking like the flour bag had exploded! Too much kool-aid mix makes for stinky play dough. Food coloring (boys insisted we add this, too!) and little boys don't mix well, either. Cream of tartar is WAY too expensive, especially when you need 1 cup of the stuff! Overall, homemade play dough is WAY too expensive and a pain to make with children. Now I know why people just buy the store bought stuff! But, homemade play dough is less crumbly, which makes for easier clean up and making the stuff provides a little entertainment and encouragement for my boys to nap while it cools!!

Fast forward to after nap...The boys wake up and play with their fancy play dough. Graham just wants to eat the stuff, but it's so salty it makes him gag. So, play dough playing was a short activity for him! The big boys decide that it's tons of fun to throw their play dough and try to hit various objects in my house. This is not good! While I'm tending to this disaster I realize that Graham is a little too quiet in the kitchen. I go in to see what the little booger is up too...

On a mission...

Mission ACCOMPLISHED!!!


Now it's time to eat toilet paper!!


All of my boys in action.

At this point I just throw in the towel and join in the fun. Yes, there is play dough mashed into my needle point rug in the dining room and my antique oriental rug in the living room and every other place you can imagine. There is also toilet paper ALL over my kitchen. But, that's pretty harmless. So, I end up sitting in the middle of the kitchen floor letting them cover me in toilet paper, as I am now the "toilet paper monster." Evidently, toilet paper monsters like to be covered in toilet paper!!

Oh boy! It's time to head outside before my boys take down the walls in my house. I figure that's where we're headed at this point. So, we clean up our play dough and toilet paper, put on our shoes and jackets and out we go.

The boys promptly find the praying mantis that was unfortunate to find itself in our yard. This little guy has been a play toy of theirs for a couple of days now. But, how cool! I figure it may be torture, but it's all in the name of science, right?!

Patrick showing Marshall how you hold the praying mantis.


Patrick and his little friend. He let it crawl ALL OVER him!! He loved it.
Don't know if I can say the same for the praying mantis. :)
Notice the homemade play dough stuck in his hair!

I kind of think this is a pretty cool pic. :)

The afternoon/evening ended with the boys finally putting down our praying mantis and finding the one teeny, tiny puddle in our yard. They all splashed like crazy and got soaking wet. Graham even decided to try to slurp up the gross water. He seemed to think it was pretty tasty! So, what do my boys do when they get wet??? Well, they strip down to their diapers in the backyard and continue to play in the water. Yes, it was only 50-something degrees outside, but they didn't seem to care. I let this continue for a little while before making them come inside for a bubble bath and dinner. I figured that despite them telling me they were NOT cold, the blue, quivering lips told a different story. Off we head for bath and dinner...

Everyone is nice and snug in bed and fast asleep. Momma gets to head to bed, too! I'm laying in bed thinking about our day and laughing to myself. There are so many trying, yet funny and entertaining moments in my day. And, today's activities were pretty typical. Our "typical" days would have been pretty atypical days for me several years ago, before the joys of parenthood. But, these are the days to cherish. They will pass too quickly and I know I will enjoy what the future holds, but I'm sure I will miss the simplicity of the days when the boys were young. This is why I try to document so much on this blog. I know that as time passes I will forget all these little things, but reading old posts will be a way to remember. Hopefully the boys will enjoy reading them, too.