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This week Milly has been off nursery, not sure if she had a bad cold or hayfever but her eyes were really red and puffy and she kept telling me she had  “Ned (head) ache” .

But rather than have her sat in front of the telly for days on end (although we did that too, with blankets ; )) I thought it’d be fun to try a few new projects. We started with the sensory box, I’ve been bookmarking blogs about them for ages but never actually got around to doing it. Its a bit like when you pin a load of things to pinterest, you know you want to give them all a go and then you don’t have time. And then you have pinterest guilt, you know when you think everybody in the whole world is building lifesize rocket ships out of toliet roll tubes with their kids?,  except you.

You can drown in that sort of mummy guilt, let me tell you ; )

Anyway… sensory boxes are great fun to make and play with, you can find out lots more about them here, but basically you choose a theme ( we went fairy tea party, because, well,  we have fairies and tea party stuff ) but you can choose anything. Farmyard, zoo, baking.  And the great thing is you can use the *play sand* you make for the next box.  This week fairies,  next week pirates maybe?! : )

So if you want to make one this is what you’ll need ( or rather what I used when I raided my cupboards, but you can use any combination or just one, although I think the different textures are fun and probably more educational, but what’d I know! ; ) hehe…

1 bag or box of Risotto Rice

1 bag of Semolina (for the sandy bit)

1 bag of quinoa

1 bag of buckwheat

1 bag of yellow lentils

Food colouring ( i used blue and red)

( you can also use pasta, but it takes a lot longer to dry, maybe a day)

Put the quinoa in a baking tin and drop a few spots of food colouring in, then get your hands in and toss around until evenly coated (mily loved to do this)

Do the same with the rissotto rice

I kept the buckwheat plain.

Then just leave for a few mins to dry, while you go wash your hands.

Then take a big plasic box, we used a shallow long one, like the ones you put under your bed. And fill it with the buckwheat,  quinoa, yellow lentils, rice and semolina.

Mix it all up and hey presto, you have the ground work on a little world, in which to create. We added fairies, toadstools, alphabet letters from an old scrabble set and a few bits from a tea set to create ours. We also filled a little bowl with old beads, vintage (or  grandma’s ) buttons, and  broken / junk necklaces  from ebay to use as fairy * treasure* .

There you go, hours of fun! I can honestly say out of all the toys Milly has she has already played with this the most. I think its important to change it up every few weeks though, before boredom sets in. She wants a construction site next. Thats my girl ;D

 

Yes, I know she STILL has her dummy ( even our waiter at the chinese restaurant at the weekend mentioned it ; /  ) ..we are working on it, but I believe in the gentle softly softly ideal  : ) I’m hoping she’s just going to give it up on her own, someday….really soon!

We also did some leaf painting. I fogot how much fun simple things like that are, as well as the leaves we used toliet roll tubes and foam balls for making patterns. You can uses anything, cars are good, and its great fun getting a big bowl of soapy water for a car wash afterwards … I really want to try this too, party blower painting, messy fun!

 

but nothing a long play in the bath can’t sort out ; )

What have you been up to this week lovelies?  Will you be tring out a sensory box of your own? hope so!

Also, do you have an words of wisdom about our dummy situation? i would be very appreciative ; )

See you Friday folks XXX

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 14th, 2012 at 2:42 pm and is filed under Misc. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.