Playdough!

Messy March continues and this time with playdough!   No not Play-Doh - because I'm not positive of what that is made with so I wanted to find a recipe and make my own with ingredients I'd be comfortable with my little girl ingesting if she sampled any.   I found a great recipe once again through Pinterest on How Does She?   Please go there to get the recipe - it's so simple and it's GREAT!  I overcooked it ever so slightly so it did crumble a bit, but it wasn't tacky at all so I'll take a little crumble over stickiness.  The food dye is from the blue Neon 4-pack by McCormick.  I bought some 8oz freezer jam containers and the above recipe will fill up 2 of those containers.  Works great for our needs!

I decided to test out the recipe while Ace was in school to figure out how to get it 'just right' and then in the future I'll allow him to help make more and in various colors.   It took 10 minutes total to make it and it's all 'normal' ingredients so no real extra expense was necessary.   Couldn't ask for better than that.    I thought it would be fun to play just with Mae while Ace was in school just some quiet introduction to playdough.   She would not go near it!   She touched it once and that was all she was going to do. 

I sat down and started to manipulate it and play with it and got out a few of her toys to push in it and make impressions with it.  Hoping that having some example of what to do would help.  Even tried having her sit in my lap to let her play with it.   She touched it for this picture below and that was it.    So I tucked it away and hoped the desire to be like her big brother would pique her interests a little more later that day.

Ace came home from school and was so excited.  I broke out some tools to play with and manipulate the playdough with and he got started.   Mae was excited to play with (plastic) knives and spatulas, but still no desire to touch the playdough.    She did have an internal struggle once when I created a ball.  She really wanted it - even grasped her whole hand around it before she frantically released her hold and shook her hand wildly.  Amusing.

Ace had a good time building and destroying and it was a lot of fun to help :)   We built a snowmen and then Ace had a nice running leap to jump up and smash it!  Then after that he just had a good ol' time smashing with his feet the playdough.  Jumping from high up and going to town dropping it.  All the while Mae walked around observing all this frivolity with wonder.  

More colors to be made soon and hopefully Mae will warm up to the fun play that comes with playing with playdough!  Until then she can observe her brother's delighted excitement in playing with it.



She made me wipe off her hand. She was convinced there was something terrible on it.