ice cream in a bag

We haven't posted too much lately but summer is coming (seems like it's here today) and M and I already have a long list of fun activities to try in the coming weeks. 

Today we experimented with making our own ice cream using the Ice Cream in a Bag recipe. We used the one from the Disney website but Googling "ice cream in a bag" brings up plenty. 

This is the process:

Mix 1 cup of Half and Half, 2 tablespoons of sugar, and 1/2 teaspoon of vanilla extract in a ziploc bag. In a larger (ours were actually the same size) ziploc bag fill 1/2 way with ice cubes and add 1/2 cup of salt. Then shake the whole thing for about 5 minutes. 

Obviously I prepared it but M enjoyed both shaking the bag and dancing to the sound when I shook the bag. It was a little on the heavy side for him but he managed. 

Ours was done in a little less than 5 minutes. It's pretty easy to tell when it's ready. On the website of one of the recipes I read it showed children eating the ice cream right out of the smaller bag. We put ours in a bowl and added sprinkles because the inside bag comes out covered in salt. I wasn't a huge fan of the taste (maybe less vanilla extract if we do it again) but M liked it!  One other thing- as you can see in the picture it melted rather quickly after coming out of the bag. M didn't mind but I imagine it would melt super fast outside on a hot day. 

abc book

M has been getting into the ABCs. We've always had a big foam alphabet mat on the floor in his toy corner of the basement. When our dog Skippy had back surgery and couldn't walk on our hardwood floors we had to use a alphabet mat to make him a path through the kitchen. M will try saying the letter names as he walks on it or he'll pull one right out and try to tell me what it is.

One of our first posts on this blog was about M's people book, a simple little photo album with pictures of his family and friends and labels of their names. That's always been one of his favorites. He loves looking at photographs and I've made him various other albums that are "his" that he can pull out to look through. Our newest book is an alphabet book of M's favorite things (and a few people). It's mostly people but also includes some coloring book pictures or magazine pictures (some of those letters are tough!). The most important part is that each picture is of something M can quickly recognize and say the word for. This way, when we look through it I can say, "Z is for..." and he can be part of the reading by saying "zebra."

I bought another cheapie photo album and a pack of scrapbooking letter stickers bringing the cost of this project to probably about $5. M loves it and even though its not done (X ideas welcome, as M doesn't know X-rays yet), we've "read" it several times since yesterday.

Here is a sample page, T is for Thomas:

window blocks

M has these great foam blocks that we use all the time (we're big fans of blocks).  Today we came up with a new use for them that M had a lot of fun with.  We used water to stick them to our slider and make pictures...

We got a small bowl of water to dip the blocks in and then we stuck them to the glass.  We made a tower and then some letters.  M's favorite part was the dipping...

but he also caught on to the sticking part.  He was also a fan of splashing which is why we only used about a cup and a half of water.  However, I put paper towel under the bowl and when doing this again I would definitely use a towel (or two).  If you have anything made of that foamy material it's a great activity because the pieces just wipe off at the end.

egg carton caterpillar

This is an oldie but a goodie so I'll keep it brief....

Take an old egg carton and cut it in half.  Turn it upside down and paint/decorate it.  We used our favorite Crayola paint:

Our My favorite part of painting these days is that we use one color at a time and M has to tell me the color word for the new color he wants to use.  His favorite colors are blue and red so even though he can say all the colors, he typically will tell me that everything is either blue or red - except when we're painting and he has a real reason to tell me the right color!

Anyway, let the caterpillar dry then add eyes and a pipe cleaner antenna :

Valentines

M doesn't go to daycare so we didn't have any little friends to make Valentines for this year.  Instead, we made some for a few of our relatives.  These were fairly easy to do and M had a pretty good role in helping to make them, which is always my goal.

We started by gathering a bunch of our pink and red construction paper sheets and painting them.

Next I traced M's hands on cardboard and cut out several of each hand from the paintings he made:

 Last, I cut out some hearts and glued a left and right hand onto the heart.  We had extra hearts so I made a decoration for the door to our basement as well.  We tend to hang a lot of M's art there:

On the back of each I wrote them out and then M "signed" them with crayon.  There's always something I don't get a picture of!

magnet cut-outs

This is basically a mom project but M has enjoyed playing with the product so I'm including it here.  I originally intended to make some of these magnet cut-outs of friends M doesn't see all that often.  He loves looking through his photo book and naming people he knows so I thought this would be fun for him too.  I haven't actually gotten to that point yet but I did make some of M and our immediate family. He loves pulling them off the fridge and putting them back on.

I started with these magnetic sheets.  They work just like the magnetic strips except they're 4x6 size so you could just attach a regular sized photograph to make it magnetic:

Next, I cut the picture down and cut a similarly shaped section of the magnetic sheet.  Then I attached it to the magnetic sheet.

I did end up wasting some scraps this way but since the backing of the magnets have one sheet on adhesive this was the best way I could figure to do it.  After the trimmed down photo was on the magnetic sheet, I cut around the people to make the cut-out.  Very easy and a big hit with M!

rainbow snow

M loves the snow.  He's been outside to play it in a handful of times this year and tends to stay out as long as we'll let him, followed by screaming and crying when it's time to go in.  This morning when M saw the snow he was dying to get out into it and he wasn't too happy when the dogs went out without him.  Since I was not ready for a 9am romp in the snow we brought the snow inside to us and had some fun.

I filled a 9x13 glass casserole dish with snow.  It's great snowman snow and made snowballs very easily, which M loved.  I also got three small containers, filled the each with cold water and added a drop of food coloring to each.  I gave M a big mixing spoon and a cooking brush to "paint" with.

At first M was pretty surprised that the snow could change color.  Pretty soon he was painting and eventually dumping the water into the snow.

We used yellow, red, and blue water which worked well because it mixed into green, purple, and orange so at point we had a pretty good rainbow of colors going on...until it turned to a peach colored slush.

We made snowballs, a snowman, and built some towers that M enjoyed knocking over with the spoon. Eventually about half the snow had melted leaving a coating of water on the dish.  The snowballs that were left could easily slide and spin on the wet surface, which M really enjoyed too.  All in all it served it's purpose- pushing our journey outside back a few hours.