St. Valentine's Day Massacre - Car Painting, Food Stamping, Glitter, & Glue

Last week, the day before Valentines Day, I decided that Joseph needed to make Valentines cards for all of his aunts and grandmothers.

However, for some reason, I can never seem to locate construction paper in my house (I know I have some... somewhere...). So, in order to get some red in our life, we resorted to finger painting.

Finger painting rapidly turned into matchbox car painting because Joseph likes to carry around at least two cars with him at all times these days. Seriously. My morning hugs come complete with little hands clutching two cars minimum.

The car painting was all his idea.

I had nothing to do with it. Eh. When in Toddler Rome.

He had fun exploring his new painting medium and even ended up with tire tracks on his arm. As you can see, he was thrilled...

By the time he was finished, I almost felt sorry for the poor vehicles. I think they were traumatized.

The paper was so saturated with paint that I pressed another blank paper on top of it and took a "rubbing". After both papers had dried later that evening, I cut out enough Joseph hand prints to send a pair to each of his ladies.

The plan was to attach a pair of handprints to yarn the length of Joseph's arm span and mail them as Valentines hugs. I think I saw it on Pinterest somewhere and thought it was cute.

And, really, it might have been cute... if my son's hand prints hadn't been painted bright red and didn't have tire tracks on them that made me think of car crashes. Pink would have been a much better option, but I didn't have any white paint on hand.

I don't think it helped that it was 3 in the morning and I had a bunch of hanging red hands dangling from my fist. They seriously gave me the creeps.

I imagined an aunt happily opening a newly arrived Valentines card and then getting strangled by creepy little hand prints that came flying at them to deliver their doom. Clearly, my imagination is overactive at 3 am.

I asked Stephen what he thought of them. He suggested that they looked like something I would hang from branches of a tree in the park and then let Joseph dance in naked circles around. Then, later, the town residents would all show up on our front porch with torches and pitch forks and we'd be massacred. I'd say his imagination is also overactive at 3 am... but that's just a normal Stephen response. ;)

Picture by Joseph

With visions of strangling aunts and pitch forks dancing in my head, I decided (unsurprisingly) that we needed a reboot. Even if that meant the cards would arrive late.

I scoured the internet for something cute and toddler-friendly and ultimately settled on potato & celery stamps. My celery was going bad and I had a large supply of potatoes on hand. It was meant to be!

Rose & heart cards. Those can't wind up creepy, right? As the only heart shaped cookie cutter I have is the size of my hand, I cut out the potato stamp free-hand.

Then I let Joseph do his thing. This required a little more guidance than the car painting, but not much.

I showed him what to do, occasionally positioned his hands, and let him go to town.

Then, because it was Valentines Day and I was feeling adventurous, I heavily supervised glitter sprinkling.

Something I should have done either inside a cardboard box our out on the back porch.

I don't know what I was thinking. I'm still finding little specks of glitter on the kitchen table.

While the cards dried, I gathered up the hand prints cut from the car painting rubbing. I spent over an hour cutting out hand prints and I didn't want to just chuck them. The rubbing hand prints were considerably less red and didn't seem as creepy. 

I got out a bag of foam shapes from the dollar store and picked out the hearts. I gave it to Joseph and showed him how to glue the hearts onto the hand prints.

I figured gluing hearts all over the hands would make them less Friday-the-13th-creepy and more Valentines-Day-cute. I think they had the desired effect.

Joseph's favorite part was pressing the hearts into place with all the strength he could muster. :)

Then, we folded the cards, wrote a little message, added a hand print, and "signed" each one with "letters" or, as Joseph puts it, "A, E, A, O, E".

We even stamped the corner of each envelope to make them pretty.

I started out with a simple idea to create Valentines with Joseph and somehow it turned into a 4-in-1 toddler craft party. Car painting, potato stamping, celery stamping, & gluing foam shapes. If you are looking for a single toddler craft to wile away 15 minutes, pick any of the above. Each & every one kept Little Man plenty entertained. :)

Playdough?! Pffth. Please. That is SO last month.

As part of our daily routine together, Joseph always helps me prepare our meals in the kitchen. As long as it doesn't involve sharp, pointy knives, boiling water, or sizzling oil, he's in on the action. If I pull out the step ladder, blender, or mixer, the kid immediately races over to assist with a great deal of enthusiasm.

I'm really pushing the whole "mommy's big helper" bit for when his baby sister arrives. I'm self-serving like that.

Anyways, after using a bunch of egg whites to make his Aunt Kate a birthday cake over the weekend, Joseph and I had to come up with a use for the leftover egg yolks. When I found this recipe for fresh pasta, I remembered that I actually have a pasta maker from my childhood... Hmm... Toddler... Pasta maker... Noodles... DECISION MADE!!

We made the dough together the night before and refrigerated it. Joseph was not happy with me when I put HIS dough in the fridge and so he was very excited when I pulled it out the next morning and handed it to him:

We rolled out the dough together while I made very unladylike straining noises. Rolling is hard work! Besides, toddlers find these noises endlessly funny and are big on imitating them:

And then laughing uproariously after doing so:

Of course, at this point, Joseph looked up and noticed that it was snowing outside. Naturally, he wanted to go out right away. Like yesterday, Mommy! Being flexible, I went and grabbed his clothes and winter gear... Joseph was a tad put out. I obviously didn't comprehend the urgency of the situation. Cars needed to be driven on snowy roads. Crashes needed to take place. Jeez. Mother's just don't understand! Who needs shoes when there's snow on the ground???

He was thrilled right up until his gloves became wet and cold. Then the world was ending.

So, we went back to pasta making...

Do you see the look of wonder?? Priceless.

Just look at the focus in the kid's eyes!!

Dudes... If you have a toddler at home... you need to try this. We spent almost an hour playing with pasta. 

And, okay, eating the pasta...

...and turning the crank in the opposite direction to feed the linguine noodles backwards...

...which actually results in this really neat ripple effect...

We even made thin lasagna noodles, but Joseph didn't think they were as cool as the spaghetti and linguine. Picky, picky.

The pasta maker can be clamped to a table, so we did all of this while sitting at Joseph's picnic table in the middle of the kitchen. We do everything there, so thanks Mom!

I think the pictures speak for themselves.

This was a fabulous toddler activity and a very entertaining morning. And we got lunch out of it.

We tossed the boiled noodles with olive oil, lemon juice, basil, salt, pepper, and fresh tomato. It was quite tasty, but Joseph was less interested in eating the cooked noodles. I guess he had already filled up, so he focused on getting me to slurp...

And since he didn't eat much in the way of lunch, we then made Kim Woodward's smoothie...

I'm pretty sure Joseph would live off of that smoothie if he could and it's the only way I can get him to eat spinach... So thanks for sharing, Kim!

Baby sister is also grateful. ;)

I really, really loved this activity. I enjoy cooking and baking with Joseph in general, but this was just extra fun! It made me a little nostalgic too because I remember making spinach linguine with my sisters with the same pasta maker as a kid. We strung all of the pasta up over the cabinet doors because the strands were so long. Good times. I will definitely be doing this again in the future!

Mrs. Claus Came To Town!!!!

I'm a library kind of girl. From a young age, I was convinced that I'd either end up as a teacher or a librarian. In middle school and high school (and college), I practically lived in the school library. I even hung out with and assisted our middle school librarian. (Yeah. I was really, really, really cool.) On the other hand, I also used to play teacher with my sisters and give them homework assignments. Which, for some crazy reason, the never did. Punks.

Really, it was a toss up.

So, from the moment Joseph started showing an interest in books, I desperately wanted to take him to the library to participate in their Preschool Story Time. Desperately. Unfortunately, story time was smack dab in the middle of morning nap time. I was SO sad, but we would still spend some time in the children's section of the library a few times a week. They have heat ;). Recently, though, the little man has gone down to one midday nap... which means that, in place of our morning nap, we went to Preschool Story Time for the first time today! EEE!

And who should appear at our very first Preschool Story Time ever?

Well, aside from about 25 other preschoolers, which was cause for crazy excitement all on its own, we got to meet MRS. CLAUS!! Woot woot!

She read books about Christmas and we sang songs and there were crafts. It was heavenly!

Ok, I was probably more excited than Joseph... This was his first Preschool Story Time after all. He decided to play it cool and act the part of the casual, aloof observer.

He alternated between sitting in my lap and hugging me really tightly during story time. While all the other kids listened to Mrs. Claus, Joseph watched all the other kids. When all the other kids stood up together to sing and dance, Joseph stood up and watched the other kids. He'd look at me like, "Mom? What on earth are they all doing??"

I think the sudden influx of what essentially amounted to a classroom full of children was a lot for him to take in all at once. He was excited to see other kids, but unsure what to do. I give it a few more weeks of story time sessions and he'll be participating away.

Of course, when the little girl in front of us lay down on the carpet, Joseph was all over that:

Yup. He decides what activities he will participate in. And that rug was the perfect place to chill.

After story time, it was time for arts and crafts. I showed Joseph how to cut the paper with kids scissors and then held the scissors out to him to see what he would do. He looked from the scissors to the paper and then picked up the paper and ripped it in half using the cut I'd already made. I guess that's one way to cut out a stocking. Same result, different tool. Oh toddlers.

Joseph was very fond of the glue. He even (surprise, surprise) tried to eat it. I convinced him to "pat, pat!" the cotton balls instead. I'm no fun.

Next came stickers and markers. Joseph is far more interested in removing and replacing marker caps than he is with actually coloring. We'll get there.

Stocking complete, Joseph and I went to meet Mrs. Claus in person. Joseph was all, "Hey lady, nice to meet you, now hand over the candy canes!" However, when I asked Joseph to tell Mrs. Claus what Santa says, he shyly told her, "Ho ho ho!" Winning.

On the way out of the room, Joseph spotted a giant sun on the carpet. He was extremely excited about this. There was a great deal of pointing and clapping. We had to do The Itsy Bitsy Spider a few times before leaving the room.

I think Joseph's favorite part of the whole excursion was hanging out with all the other little kids in the children's section of the library before going home for lunch.

All of the libraries in our county are well stocked with educational toys. They participate in a Virginia wide program in which they continually exchange bins of toys. Every time there are new toys at the library, I get all excited. Have I mentioned that I'm a huge fan of the library?

The county library has preschool story hour on Tuesdays and Thursdays every week and our town library has preschool story hour once a month. I plan to attend with Joseph at least once a week, if not twice.

If you are at home with youngsters, I strongly recommend that you check out what your local library system has to offer in the way of a children's section and children's programs. Participating in such programs is an excellent way to encourage a love of reading at a young age, to socialize your child with other children in his/her age group, and to get your child ready for school. Plus, you could meet some new mommies in the process! Just think of the playdate possibilities!!! :)