mixology 101

I'm always looking for ideas to keep M busy while I cook dinner at night. A few nights ago I gave him two bowls of water and a medicine dropper. 20 minutes of fun. It helped that he's been fascinated with droppers since Baby G came along. 

Today we tried something similar but if added a drop of food coloring into the water and we experimented with mixing colors. 

M enjoyed seeing what colors we could make but he enjoyed squirting the dropper more. He also stirred and eventually tried pouring. 

Admittedly, it didn't last as long as it did the first time (novelty is everything with this kid) but we did have fun and only made a semi-large mess :)

sensory bottles

This is something I've wanted to try with M for a few weeks.  I was thinking of waiting until we moved because a lot of our art stuff is packed but today I gave it a try anyway.  If you Google "sensory bottles" you'll find lots of different ideas for different ways to make these.  You need empty bottles, some food coloring, and some fun stuff to put inside of them.  M loves shaking bottles or cups (or anything that makes sound) so this was a fun activity for him.  He also enjoys anything that rolls and you can bet he figured out that these roll pretty quickly.  We made three today.

This one was the first one we did and it's my favorite.  It's water, oil, glitter, and some green beads.  I started with only yellow food coloring and then decided to add some blue to turn it green.  The oil is yellow and the water is green which gives it a really cool look when M shakes it or turns it upside down.  I didn't fill any of our bottles to the top because M likes to make noise and full bottles are a lot quieter than ones with a little space left over.

This one is water, dish soap, red food coloring, and the rest of the beads we had.  The more you shake it the more suds it makes.  M loves it.

For the last one we did purple water with a bunch of Tubettini macaroni.  This one requires a little extra oomph to get the macaroni really moving.  It's nice because it makes M work a little harder than the others.

If your child is like mine you'll want to give the caps a little extra reinforcement.  I used packing tape but any stronger tape would work:

As I said, there are a ton of possibilities for these.  I opted to fill all of them with liquid because M already has some containers with dry macaroni, beans, etc. that are used as noisemakers.  But an empty bottle with some beans or something similar would be a fun one as well.  I also came across some quieter options like a bottle filled with colored feathers or those little soft pom pom balls.  I think we'll definitely end up making more of these in the future.  It will be fun when M can participate in filling them and coming up with ideas for what to put inside.  

M's age when we played: 12 months