Outdoor Messiness

Way back in June, The Iowa Farmer's Wife had a post about an Outdoor Messy Playdate and I thought it would be the perfect thing to eat up a morning at home with nothing to do. If we stay inside, the kids tend to destroy everything we've ever owned. Or at least everything they can reach.

Since it was just us, I picked two of the activities: the cloud dough bin and (super-easy!) shaving cream table. (Well, three activities if you count the baby pool.)

We started with lunch outside. If we were going to get messy, anyway, might as well have spaghetti, right?

Messy? I think I can handle that.

For the cloud dough, you mix up 24 cups flour with 3 cups clear oil (baby or mineral). Google told me a 5lb bag of flour contains 20 cups. (It really didn't want to translate weight to cups for me, though, and made it abundantly clear this varies.) I figured I'd adjust the recipe down to just use 1 bag, no measuring needed.

The oil was a problem, though. I pulled this together the evening before and didn't want to go to Wal-Mart, but couldn't find any at several stores. I finally found some overpriced baby oil when I went to the grocery store for flour. Luckily the one bottle they had happened to be 20 ounces, the exact amount needed to adjust the recipe to 20 cups flour. Still no measuring!

I told Meg to try and keep all the dough in the bin.

You can see that went well.

The kids were so enamored with the cloud dough, I had to talk Meg into playing with the shaving cream long enough for a picture.

Is this good enough, mom?

Of course, once I decided it was time to clean off in the baby pool in preparation for going inside they were all suddenly dying to play with shaving cream all afternoon. (I let them use it up.)

The whole process actually only took two hours, which seemed like kind of a rip off after I spent all that time and effort (not to mention buying a $4 bottle of baby oil), but they took great naps and it was better than sitting around the living room wondering how much longer the hellish temperatures were going to last.*

I imagine they were saying "Isn't she the best mommy ever?"

*This was in July. I'm obviously super on top of the blogging.