Play dough

M concentrated on decorating the play dough with marbles, pipe cleaners and string

It's been some time now since we first started making our own play dough. At the beginning, about half a year ago, M was not interested at all and the dough would remain in a basket on the shelves until it dried out. However, I decided to give it a go before Halloween and this time it has certainly been a success. We made it for a weekly play date and the other girl enjoyed it very much as well.
Something that has surprised me this time around is that the dough gets better and better the more used it is. M asks to play with it everyday and it has become soft and resilient at the same time that it's kept the cinnamon flavor. We are very happy about the recipe we are using, so I've thought I would share it.

That's the 2 of us making the dough

INGREDIENTS:
2 cups of all-purpose flour
1/2 cup of salt
2 tablespoons of oil
2 tablespoons of cream of tartar
1 cup of boiling water
food coloring for color
essence, spices, or essential oils for flavor

We mix all the ingredients in this order and then knead until the dough looks all right.

We could make some balls to give as play-date favors out of this batch

This recipe contained a little bit of orange food coloring for color and cinnamon to give it a scent that would evoke the season. Another batch we've made had a little red coloring to make it pink and strawberry scent. My husband pointed out that it really looks like chewing gum and it is true.
With a little bit of black construction paper and a short piece of green pipe cleaner, we turned one of the balls into a small Halloween pumpkin for decoration. But this is of course an activity for older children...

A summer day in our life after our mini vacation

It is so hot around here these days that I find it extremely difficult to sit down and write a post, although there are many issues I want to write about, one of them being of course some activities we've been doing. I also want to show you around some corners of our home, especially M's cabinets in the kitchen and bathroom, but for one reason or another I never like the pictures I take.

So I will start with the activities and outings we've done this last week so far. 

To start with, we went to visit some ducks.

We got a nice numbers ice tray and tried out an early math activity with appropriate sensorial material, the temperature being over 90 ºF/35ºC.

We've also been having some fun with water balloons: here is M sorting them. During the nap, I put them in the freezer and we played with frozen balls afterwards (I have no pics of that, I am afraid).

This morning we had two friends over for a messy play date. This is the shaving cream paint we made:

And this is how they enjoyed it:

During M's nap today I also gave old crayons a go. I really wanted rock crayons but I can't find them anywhere in Barcelona, so I've decided to make them myself. More about it, tomorrow!