What do you do with a 5 gallon bucket of lemons? Make a whole lot of lemon juice ice cubes. I love having lemon juice ice cubes around, they are great for that quick fix of lemonade or adding to iced tea. Using the lemon juicer is also good for coordination and hand strength! No, she didn’t do the whole bucket. 
Starting the wee one off with the painting thing. Liquid water colors and fingers. Two months ago technically, looking at the EXIF. Oooh, I’m too busy, aren’t I? Hmm. What to do. I’ll have to think about that one.
What are we doing? Making cheese. The easy way – scald milk and add a little acid – lemon juice or vinegar. We got the idea from ‘The Toddlers Busy Book’, which I haven’t used much, but has a bunch of fun ideas. There is a good description of cheese making here, the bare bones section is basically what we did.
One of the reasons I wanted to do this is Rebecca will not eat cheese. I think she wants to like it, but she really doesn’t. She used to adore cottage cheese when she was really little, then no more. Although I think she’s starting to come around, we made this cheese about a month ago, (yes, I am working through my photo backlog, what gave you that idea? Good thing I ‘blog without apology’, or I’d be feeling guilty that I was ‘behind’.) and she ate an entire string cheese last week. I was really surprised.
Anyway, she was very excited to make cheese, and then she couldn’t eat it, too bad! She thought it was awful. But that’s okay, dad thought it was great! We used lemon juice, and it gave it a nice flavor. We did squeeze it much too hard in the cheese cloth though, it came out very dry. And we forgot to add the salt, oops. I think we should try again. It is cute though, isn’t it?
[Recently all my comments have started being flagged as spam by Akismet, so if I don't respond to your comment by email promptly, okay, it always takes me a couple days, but if it takes me a week, sorry, I forgot to check my spam comments again. Dunno what I broke...]
While playing we found out that our hangers from Ikea make excellent little marble tracks. Rebecca insisted on filling up the whole thing with my marble collection, good work for little fingers, also there was the challenge of keeping them from rolling where she didn’t want them as the floor isn’t flat..
We also had fun doing some wooden puzzles that I cut with our scroll saw. After Rebecca did them right side up she decided to give it a go upside down. They are small enough that it was a pretty easy job. So if you are bored of your puzzles, try them wrong side up. You could even draw a new picture on the back!
I helped with Rebecca’s class science fair project (she goes to a co-op preschool), and we did plant dyes. It was a lot of fun, I did a live drawing story, telling a story and drawing pictures at the same time, for the motivation, which I’d never done before. Thankfully it was an easy audience! Here is my story:
One day the kids in Miss Leslie’s class went to the farmers market, looked around at all the different tents selling all kinds of different fruits and vegetable, and bought a red cabbage, carrots, onions, and beets. Then on the way home at the top of a hill someone thought it should be their turn to carry the carrots, someone else thought it should be their turn to carry the onions, someone else thought it should be their turn to carry the beets, and there was a little disagreement about who should be carrying the cabbage. There was a little bit of tugging, someone bumped somebody, and the whole class rolled down the hill together with the vegetables. At the bottom they picked themselves up, and being sturdy 3&4 year olds no one was hurt. But someone noticed that there was orange all over their pants, someone had a green knee, someone was brown all over, someone’s shirt had a big red splot and one kid’s face had turned purple. Well, they wondered, where did all these colors come from? So they went back to the classroom and set out to find out.
And let me tell you, a jar of cabbage juice that has been unrefrigerated for a week smells awful!
We didn’t set the dyes with anything, we just juiced the vegetables, stuffed muslin in with the juice in jars and let it sit for a few days. In addition to the vegetables we also used dirt and grass, which the kids collected. What smells worse than a jar of old cabbage juice? An art rack full of hanging strips of muslin that have been marinating in old onion skins, beet juice and cabbage juice. It was raining outside, so the rack was drying inside. I’m glad I wasn’t working in the classroom that day, when I came to pick Rebecca up, wow did the room smell. But it was all for SCIENCE! Hmm.
There are 8 spots in the watercolor tray, and we have 8 fingers. Obviously this is not coincidence, it is a mandate. Today we had a very spotty watercolor painting.
Scatter brained crafty mama. I craft with a little bit of everything, during those precious nap time minutes.
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