A Not so Haunted House

My family has always done gingerbread houses around Christmas time so I had this great idea to make a Halloween house (not a scary haunted house, c'mon, Haylee's only 3 years old) with Haylee. All the prep work took a little longer than I anticipated so Haylee only got to do a little bit of the decorating before bed and I felt bad doing the rest without her but it was one of those nights when we both needed her to go to bed and I really needed to finish asap before my royal icing turned into royal cement...

It was worth it though. I was rewarded in the morning with plenty of oohs and ahhs and wows and "thanks for making this house for me mom!" oh, and several "can I eat it nows?" thrown here and there too.

It took more time than I planned but it really was a lot of fun. I recommend this project to anyone, with or without kids.

Tactile Snacking

What better way to teach your kids to enjoy different tactile experiences than to finger paint with chocolate pudding? You can tell which one was a little more into the experience than the other! I love these pictures because they show how vastly different these 2 girls' personalities are...

Haylee likes to take her time with new things until she's more sure of herself and only then she will let loose - a little. She also likes to have everything clean; she really couldn't believe I was encouraging her to do this. Also I think she went and washed her hands 5 times during our 20 minute finger painting experience.

Cambree, on the other hand (someone else's other hand) knew immediately the purpose of this experience was to allow her to figure out how much of this gooey sweet stuff she could consume in the shortest amount of time and if, along the way, she happened to make some sort of design on her tray, well that was just an added benefit. She ended up needing a "refill" from the paint pot about as often as Haylee washed her hands!