I often wonder how long it will be before my kids have more Facebook friends than I do.  Granted, they aren't even in Kindergarten yet, so I have time, but it'll be here before I know it, especially for Little Buddy.  He is the most social toddler I've ever seen.  The first day of Mother's Day Out there were no tears.  In fact, he barely gave me a backward glance and every week he runs to his teachers and flings himself into their arms.  Unfortunately, he literally gets sick every time I send him and I can't lie to myself anymore.  It's not a coincidence.  After much deliberation, I've decided to pull him out of school.  It just wasn't worth all of us being sick all the time just for three hours of "education".  He isn't even two yet so he'll have time later for school and hopefully by then he'll have a better immune system.  I do feel bad about it because he loved it so much.  To compensate for my guilt, (Mommy guilt never ends, does it?) I'm going to also make an effort to do some fun stuff and sensory learning with the kids and make sure to include him.  

This week I decided to tackle a rainy day activity I had been wanting to do for a long time: Vinegar and Baking soda, but with a twist. I decided to add paint to this extravaganza.  I pulled out the foil pans I bought from the Dollar Store (a GREAT investment) and we started off with a little bit of paint on the bottom of the tin:

They stirred around the paint for awhile and after they got bored of this, we introduced...the baking soda!!  I decided to use our squirt bottles for this...my kids just love them AND they are really good for muscle development. I invested in a few cheap ones from Walmart several months ago and we use them ALL the time. The kids sprinkled some baking soda on the bottom of the tin, then I filled up the squirt bottles with vinegar and I explained what would happen.  I'm not really great at science, so the explanation was pretty rudimentary, but they got the idea very quickly.

See that fizzle?  Frankly, the tin didn't look all that pretty after a few minutes, but they kept squiring and stirring and squirting for almost 45 minutes! I think it's kind of hard to find ways to work on fine motor skills for toddlers, because they are a little limited on what they can do, but squirt bottles are pretty easy and very enjoyable for Little Buddy!

The kids were responsible for cleaning up their own messes so they each had a dish towel next to them.  Anytime they got wild and got vinegar on the table, they had to stop and clean it up, so it really wasn't a messy project at all.  Everything stayed well contained in the foil tin.  This wasn't necessarily the easiest craft we've ever done, but it was a cheap craft and it really wasn't that messy.    When they were done I just rinsed out the tins to use them again! Pin It

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