Finger Painting

Being home all week with Aidyn has been great! It's also been exhausting. :) Not so much because of his crawling, but because he now wants/needs to be entertained. Sitting among a pile of toys no longer is enough. So, in my quest to find something to do, I talked with several friends whose kids attend childcare. Both are boys a month or two YOUNGER than Aidyn and both attend seperate centers. Both have also had the opportunity of finger painting at school, so I thought, "Why not? Should be interesting."

So, on Tuesday (when it quit raining for about 2 hrs), Aidyn and I walked down the street to a kids specialty / toy store that recently openend up. It's called - Under the Apple Tree. In the store, I noticed they had finger paint on sale: 4 colors (red, yellow, blue, and green) for $5.35. I read the package to make sure it was non-toxic and discussed my intentions with the store owner. She assured me that it was a safe product and should be fine for Aidyn to use. And that was it! We bought it and made plans to paint on Wednesday.

Wednesday morning, I laid 2 of Aidyn's bath towels under his highchair which I'd pushed up to our dinner table. I also taped a large piece of Christmas wrapping paper (upside down with white side up) on the table. Then, I just got a few pieces of regular white computer paper.

I filled the bath with pretty warm water, so it wouldn't be cold by the time we were done, and stripped Aidyn down to his diaper. Unfornately, the table is a little tall for Aidyn to reach in his high chair. So, luckily (ha), I found a large book of Ben's (shhh! don't tell him) and used it as a "booster chair" in Aidyn's highchair. :)

It worked perfectly, almost.

We started with blue and yellow finger paint. After Aidyn tried eating it, and I kept trying to tell him no, I decided to stop. He wasn't quite understanding what to do, which was fine, and so I decided if he was going to eat it...we might as well try pudding.

We had some vanilla sugar free pudding in the pantry that I got out and mixed with red food coloring to add some color to it. Put down a new piece of paper, and put Aidyn back in the chair.

This time he didn't try to eat it at all. I'm not sure if it was because I kept telling him no the first time with the paint, or if he just wasn't interested. Instead...he rubbed it ALLLL over his legs! I never saw him try to eat it, but after looking at the pictures, he must've gotten some to his mouth at some point.

After no success with the paint or pudding, we went on up for a bath.

Oh well. Maybe we'll try again on Christmas Break. He'll be 11 months old then.

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I tried uploading these two videos in "order" with my text, but can't ever seem to get my pictures, videos, etc to fall in the right order when I do both throughout. So...they aren't anything spectacular, but I knew a few people might enjoy watching Aidyn try it out. So, here goes. One is finger paint and the other is the pudding.

Hopefully we'll have better luck next time.