Embracing the Mess

I am not a natural lover of things getting messy-especially when I know I am going to be the one cleaning it up. That has certainly translated into hesitancy in doing activities with the kids that involve huge messes for me to clean. But with a little inspiration from a few blogs that I've been getting ideas from, and a little letting down of my desire to control, I've slowly been embracing the idea of giving Krieg and Karis freedom to be kids and make creations and use their imagination to explore the world! Here are a few pictures of the fun they've been having lately...

 Today's adventure- Moon dough. the original recipe called it Cloud Dough, but Krieg and Karis have been pretending to be astronauts a lot lately and have taken many trips to the moon, so Moon Dough seemed like a more appropriate name. They played with it for a good hour at least and were COVERED in flour, as was the floor. But they certainly enjoyed themselves!

 This was a spontaneous mess initiated by Krieg, when he decided to take out his saw and go to town on some styrophome that came in a box the other day. He worked on it on 3 different occasions, probably for 2 hours. Kevin taught him how to saw on an angle, which actually allowed him to saw through it pretty effectively. Krieg then proceeded to try and teach Karis how to saw, which obviously wasn't exactly successful, but it was so fun watching them work together. This was by far the biggest mess to clean up, three different times, but it was so worth seeing their satisfaction in actually sawing something with their own tools.

 This was our Oobleck experiment from last week. So simple and they loved it. We will be doing this one again soon- probably outside, and with more, plus a little food coloring! 

While we were in Myrtle Beach, I spent a lot of my free time blog-hopping trying to come up with indoor activities to keep us busy during July with a new baby and 100* weather. I stumbled upon a whole slew of play-dough ideas, and we have spent hours upon hours playing with it recently. This picture was in our hotel room making Wild Things, using mostly Mr. Potato Head pieces. Since then, we made a huge batch of home-made play dough, which the kids love because they get a ton more of it to use at one time. Plus the process of mixing it was really fun for Krieg and his friend Lydda Grace.

So here's to a lot more mess-making, memory-making, exploring, creating and cleaning!