Monday Minute: More Pinteresting

If you read my post yesterday, you know I'm having a hard time keeping Drew entertained at the end of the day. I'm wiped, but he's ready to play. So we've still been doing some Pinterest projects in the afternoons/evening so he can be stimulated and I can rest.

(I will admit some of these were still summer vacation, others have been the last week or so... I don't remember which were which).

First, I saw this idea on Pinterest and KNEW Drew would love it! The idea suggested using bent PVC pipes and proping them on one end of a couch, then placing a basket at the other end. Then give your child a basket of golf balls and let them have fun! I just happened to have a large cardboard tube on hand (it actually held the fabric used to make Drew's curtains... which now seems like ages ago). I cut it in half, and voila- balls and slides that kept him entertained for quite a while!



Of course, two slides are better than one!



And I just had to share our animals' reactions...



We had some fun painting with different textures. Drew would paint 24/7 if allowed, so this was definitely a big hit. I gave him an English muffin (the site had suggested a waffle but I didn't have a waffle... and in the future I will toast the English muffin), a branch of leaves from a bush, a sheet of foam stickers left behind from scrapbooking "pop dots", a balloon, a piece of sponge, a nail scrub brush, a pipe cleaner, and a "dingle ball" (the cats don't use them anyway).

An unexpected heart!

Finished product

Another fun activity was a "problem solving" kind of activity- I filled some balloons with water, then we went outside with a plastic knife and I let him see if he could pop the balloons. They were actually quite tricky to pop (real water balloons may have been better, but I had a bunch of regular balloons left over from Stacey's shower), and Drew gave up pretty quickly and only wanted me to do it. Still, I guided him a bit (and stepped on the balloons to make them more vulnerable), and he had a blast when they splashed (then quickly picked up all the pieces of the broken balloon, I swear I don't know where this OCD comes from!).

Last, but not least, we did some salt painting. Drew got to decorate black paper with glue, then cover it with salt, then he painted the salt with diluted food coloring- the color spreads along the lines of glue/salt. It was actually quite fascinating to me, but Drew only cared about the fact that he was painting, so I eventually just let him "water paint" on a white piece of paper.