We Couldn't Resist

 I follow a lot of art and education blogs and browse Pinterest from time-to-time, searching for various activities that I think we'll enjoy doing at home with Jonah. Recently, I came across a couple of ideas that focused on resist painting and thought it could be a fun, educational, and seasonal activity we could engage in with him.

The essence is that we used painter's tape as a resist on paper and canvases. Jonah doesn't yet have the dexterity to do this on his own, but we quickly ripped and placed the tape for him and he went at it with his paintbrush (and hands). The first weekend, we made snowflake scenes on art paper; the second weekend, we made Valentine-themed messages on canvas. I'm not sure whether it was the additional experience, the novelty of the canvas, or the slightly smaller size of the canvases, but he was much more enthusiastic about it the second weekend. We actually had to tape off a few more canvases while he was working to satisfy his creative binge (note to self: time to stock up on more multi-packs of canvases at Michael's).

Sticking out my tongue always helps!

The project was a great opportunity to work on a number of skills and introduce some new concepts, including use of a paint brush, color mixing, negative space, resists, different media (canvas versus paper), pulling tape off of canvas, and the concept of Valentine's Day.

Jonah's idea of color mixing right now is quite interesting: he pretty much just pushes all of the paint around until it becomes mostly the same color. When we encouraged him to use a particular color and mix it on the canvas, he would go around and get a dot of each of the colors from his palettes (paper plates), such that he was never really adding just one color to his canvas. The results are great, but the process is not at all like how we as adults might have gone about it. I know it's important to remember that!

Intent on his painting, with that tongue still out.

Additionally, he has really started to use the brush quite well, moving it around on the paper and canvas in broad strokes. However, during each session, he eventually found his hands to be the most compelling canvas, painting the left one thoroughly (and well up his forearm as well). When we painted canvases, he also actively used his hands as a brush at points to distribute the paint.

What will this look like when I get the tape ripped off?

When it came time to pull the tape (resist) off of the paper and canvas, we found that we couldn't really let him help with the paper artworks, as the paper ripped away a bit. However, he was able to help remove tape from the canvases (for as long as it kept his interest), and it was fun to watch his reaction as he saw the clean, white canvas beneath.

The snowflake works are now hanging in the playroom where we can see them every day. For Valentine's Day, Jonah selected an artwork to send to each of his grandparents; Ben and I got to keep three of them and I know we will treasure them!

The finished works of art!

Early stages of covering the paper, with tape still visible.

Painting his hands instead of the paper. Caught in action.

The finished snowflake scenes.

Christmas Trees!

Rolling the cone in the toppings.

Continuing the arts and crafts theme, Jonah and I had a good time at the end of November making Christmas trees out of sugar cones, white chocolate, and a variety of decorative toppings, including miniature M&Ms, coconut, and sprinkles. I'd seen the idea on Pinterest or on one of the blogs that I follow and thought it was a good seasonal activity for his current skills and abilities.

In an attempt to rein in the messiness, I plated the various toppings and let Jonah roll the ice cream cones in them, as the white chocolate itself was relatively hot and I wasn't sure he was able to handle spooning it on the cones. He enjoyed rolling the cones for a while, but the sugary foods soon won out (and stuck to his hand as he touched the white chocolate). It quickly became an opportunity to eat as much sugary stuff as possible, which is fine for a "special treat."

At first, Jonah tried to be sneaky about eating the toppings. Which is pretty hilarious. There is nothing "sneaky" about a 2.5 year old. (He currently likes to "hide" right in plain sight of us.) But I pretended to ignore it for a while. Eventually, he didn't try to hide it and his face and hands became increasingly covered with the sweets. The nonpareils were especially bad for sticking to his hand and he resorted to shoving his entire hand in his mouth to eat them. What a mess he was by the end, and what a great time we had!

I'm not eating this coconut, Mommy!

I put our trees on a small table near the front entry, amidst some stuffing arranged to look like snow. Unfortunately I didn't take pictures of this (or I can't find them right now), but it was nice to walk by the trees every day and be reminded of our fun time together. I think this is a project I'll keep on the list to do again in the years to come!

Oh, you caught me, didn't you?

Open mouth, insert hands.

Look at that messy face!

Our finished "forest."

Not a Box

Painting the bottom of the car.

In our house, we are big fans of Antoinette Portis' book, Not a Box, which illustrates imaginative play and all of the things that a simple box could be imagined as. In early November, just after Jude was born, I received a huge box from Amazon filled with my subscribe and save shipment of diapers, wipes, etc. While the box was sitting empty in the hallway, Jonah stepped inside it, and an evening of pulling him around the house in his new "car" ensued.  What fun!

To help reinforce the notion that the box could be a car, I suggested that the following day we paint the box and that Jonah should think about the color he wanted to paint it. In the end, he settled for pretty much all of the colors of paint, which was just fine. I moved our rolling cart from the center of the kitchen and rounded up one of our drop cloths to protect the floor. Jonah had a good time using the paint brush and liked walking around the box to work on painting different portions of it. I had a difficult time keeping him from painting the bottom of the box, which I'd placed up on the floor (only really a concern because we were going to drag the complete box around the house as a car again), and Jonah had a hard time concentrating on any one section long enough to cover it completely with paint. Unfortunately, I realized too late that we never got a photo of the "completed" car.

Getting paint off the plate, er, palette.

We had a great time and I wish I could have given Jonah more painting opportunities while I was on leave. It was simply too difficult to know when I might have to drop everything to address Jude's needs, and Jonah is incredibly messy when it comes to paints (and doesn't yet understand our desire to keep paint off of things). That said, I look forward to more and more "not a box" experiences, as Jonah is really beginning to show a lot of imagination in his play (we've taken advantage of this to some degree with his eating as well - last night, he ate spoonfuls of Thomas, Percy, Harold, Tractor Mac, Plane Jane, etc.).

I think I'll move on to this side of the car.

Waiting for Mommy to dole out some more paint.

Halloween Tricks and Treats

Cheese! Look at me working on a pumpkin!

Halloween fell right on the heels of Jude's birth, but we managed to do a remarkable number of activities to celebrate the season. I'd done a bit of planning in advance, which helped (Jude's due date was after Halloween, so I'd been expecting a bit more time to do Halloween activities), and I think I must have been running on complete adrenaline at that point. I'm not sure how we did it all, in retrospect. Apparently, Ben and I do a pretty good tag team.

I follow quite a number of blogs with kids' arts projects and frequent Pinterest as I have time, so we settled in at the new home by making pumpkins with tissue and contact papers (one set of instructions is available here). It seemed a pretty simple project we could all enjoy together and skill-appropriate for Jonah. He enjoyed playing with the tissue paper for a while, but lost interest pretty quickly. He probably would have had more fun picking the tissue paper off the floor or ripping or crumpling it. Sigh - maybe some day I will have a child who wants to do crafts with me!

All three pumpkins hanging in the window of the play room.

On the day that we brought Jude home from the hospital, we learned that the neighborhood trick-or-treat was that evening. We'd missed our old neighborhood trick-or-treat the prior night and weren't certain what to expect in the new neighborhood. I'd picked up a shark costume for Jonah in August or September in a resale shop, recognizing a good deal when I saw it (plus the selection was great because Halloween was still so far off).

Jonah had seen the costume and was excited to wear it, even refusing to take it off one Saturday morning in September while we ran a few errands.  When it was time to go trick-or-treating, however, he refused to put it on and threw a tantrum. Finally, we told him it was his last chance if he wanted to go out to trick-or-treat and he decided that he did (though still with a few tears, as you can see here).

I'm still not so sure about this trick-or-treat thing.

He chose me to walk around the neighborhood with him (lucky me!), and we went down 116th and 117th Street, where there really were surprisingly few houses participating in trick-or-treat. Whether they were also caught off guard about the date (the notice appeared in our box that day) or this neighborhood is more bah humbug about the holiday, I cannot say. It wasn't like Jonah needed a lot of candy or we needed to be out in the cold for too long, so it was not necessarily a bad thing.

Watching a movie in his costume.

I'd encouraged Jonah to try to make shark sounds upon answers to doorbells, but that didn't go over with him. So then we worked on saying "trick or treat." This worked pretty well, with the exception of one house, where he sang "happy birthday" for them. Nothing like getting things a little mixed up for a laugh! Perhaps by next year, he'll have the routine down!

We'd talked up hot chocolate upon his arrival home, so he was excited about that, and we also let him watch a short movie on TV (I think we probably watched Dr. Seuss' Sneetches or something similar).  At that point, he wasn't too interested in removing his costume, as you can see in this photo at right.

Posing with the pumpkin he selected.

The following day, we decided it was time to carve the pumpkins we'd picked up at Basse's weeks earlier (and had moved from our old house to the new). Last year, we picked pumpkins and thought that Jonah would be interested in carving them, but he wanted absolutely nothing to do with the process and even refused to stick his hands inside the pumpkin. As a result, we weren't quite sure what to expect this year.

We needn't have worried, as Jonah was very interested in checking out pumpkin innards this year. Perhaps it helped that I marketed them as "pumpkin guts." Perhaps it helped that we had some new little tools for cutting from Target that looked appealing to a little boy. Perhaps it was just a better afternoon nap and a year's growth. Jonah was definitely interested in using the little scoop to get inside the pumpkin and we asked his input about how we should carve the face. Obviously, he was too little to use the sharp tools, but he requested a jack o'lantern with "a creepy mouth with sharp teeth." That took a little clarifying - we drew some examples on paper, as you don't want to get a temper-tantrum-prone 2-year old's vision wrong, believe me - and we ended up with two similar looking pumpkins.

What's in there, Mommy?

Scooping out the seeds.

Posing with the finished products.

After we finished carving the pumpkins, we let Jonah have a piece of candy from his bucket. He chose the Reese's peanut butter cup (there's a boy after my own heart). He'd never had one before, but I think he liked it:

Hmm... first bite (and a BIG one).

This thing is pretty awesome!

Cutting out a bat for Halloween.

One of my goals for my time home on leave was to try to do some fun activities with Jonah on the days he is home from day care (we are continuing to send him 3 days a week to give me time alone with Jude and to give Jonah time with his friends and activities that would be difficult for me to supervise by myself with a newborn). I feel like I did a better job with that goal early on, before the Christmas holiday preparations began in earnest. At any rate, we cut out and frosted some Halloween sugar cookies to take to Jonah's teachers and the staff at the day care center.

Everything is easier with a tongue hanging out.

We've made cookies together before, and Jonah has naturally become more active and helpful in the process. For whatever reason, he enjoys eating the flour used to dust the work surface (he calls it sugar sometimes). He also tries to sneak hunks of cookie dough into his mouth, often giving us a knowing and taunting look before doing so because he knows he isn't supposed to be eating it. Watching where he puts the cookie cutter in the dough isn't a priority yet, so it's easy to end up with partial cookies and a lot of wasted dough in each rolling. We'll get there with time, I'm certain.

We frosted cookies after Jonah's nap and I let him have an avocado knife to frost one on his own. He went right to it spreading on the frosting and finished frosting one before really starting to get his hands into his mouth. I got out some chocolate chips to let him help with putting eyes, noses, and smiles on the pumpkins, and he did that for a while, but we had to stay right on top of him because his hands were constantly going back and forth between the sweets and his mouth. In the end, we just let him decorate a few cookies of his own and isolated them from the remainder.

Putting on a chocolate chip mouth.

The final Halloween activity in which Jonah took part was the costume parade they hold at day care. The kids bring their costumes and walk down Wisconsin Avenue on the Marquette campus (or they are pushed in buggies if they are too little to walk). My understanding is that they have done this for years and years and that sometimes employees in buildings along the way will pass out candy to the older kids. We took in a fair amount of candy for this purpose as we overbought, not knowing how poor trick-or-treat attendance would be in our new house.

Showing off his costume at daycare.

Jonah was much happier about wearing his costume for the day care event, which Ben stuck around campus for. I imagine this is the last year I'll be able to pick out Jonah's costume for him. I wonder what he might choose for himself next year and whether I'll have to help construct something to make his costume happen. Time will tell!!

Jonah's classroom at daycare. Front row: Jonah and Noah. Back row: Aurora, Adeline, Adriel, Hazel, Isaac, and Mia.

Do Art!

Jonah enjoys art projects, like most kids his age probably do. We're lucky in that he engages in some sort of art project nearly every day at day care. I have no idea how they manage to keep him as neat and clean as they do, but those that we do here at home usually result in large messes. While those are certainly fun and have their place, there are also times when one wants to provide artistic experiences without having to expend a lot of effort in the clean-up process. While he enjoys playing with the homemade playdough I made for him, Jonah mostly "shreds" it into small pieces with his hands, rather than using the various rollers, cutters, and other fun tools we make available to him. Over the past couple of months, we've found some new activities to let Jonah "do art" (his label for these activities) that have been lower on the messiness scale:

"Painting" with the paints inside a plastic bag. Here he had the opportunity to do some color-mixing that ties in really nicely with Leo Lionni's book, Little Blue and Little Yellow, which is in regular rotation in our house.

"Painting" with bingo daubers, though he enjoyed putting his finger on the tip and getting ink on his hands. (Note: bingo daubers can be cheaply acquired at the Dollar Store.)

Hmm ... what happens when I touch this?

Using a paintbrush and watercolors from the paintbox.

Playing in the water is really as much, if not more fun than painting!

The paintbox itself is a learning experience!

It's always fun to do these art experiences together and I hope we can be better about doing them more regularly. I've lots of ideas, but don't always seem to be very good about pulling out materials for him. We've been actively saving egg cartons, toilet paper rolls, and other supplies, and I try to put Jo-Ann's coupons to good use stocking up on tissue paper and the like. Now I just need to get them out and encourage play and discovery!

This one's for the birds!

I'm constantly on the lookout for new activities and projects to try with Jonah, especially ones that are seasonally relevant and allow all three of us to have a bit of fun together. Earlier this month (or maybe last), I came across a link to create molded bird seed "ornaments" that can be put out for the birds to enjoy.  As Jonah enjoys looking at animals in his books, out the windows (this time of year), and at the zoo, I thought it would be a fun activity that would allow us to talk about the birds and what they eat, practice some stirring and "measuring" types of skills, and allow Jonah to feel new textures. Plus we could mold them into hearts, tying into Valentine's Day coming later in the week.  A week ago, we saw a beautiful red cardinal in the back yard and it's exciting to think about Jonah watching the cardinal come around to eat his creation and being able to watch the cardinal further.

I knew it would be a messy project and assumed we would be using the vacuum to clean up from the get-go. I wasn't quite prepared for how exactly he would play with the bird seed, though.  He simply picked it up in his hands, put them over his head, and dropped the seed on the ground! 

This was messy, but also instructive in terms of how the different types of seeds bounced (cracked corn versus sunflower seeds, for example).  We used measuring cups to pour the seed around in the bin (or on the floor) and into some metal muffin tins (which make a different sound than the plastic bin).

Overall, Jonah wasn't too terribly interested in helping to make the ornaments (I suppose I shouldn't have been surprised), but he did assist in putting some of the seed into the bowl to be mixed in, as you can watch here:

Ben hid a few of Jonah's toys in the birdseed for a complete sensory bin experience.  Here's some video showing Jonah playing with the measuring cups and discovering the toys in the seed:

Overall, Jonah was pretty quiet for the majority of the nearly one hour that we spent engaged in this activity.  This is rather unusual for him, as he is constantly jabbering, but we think he was simply having a great time, concentrating on what he was doing and thinking about what he might be able to do with the seed and tools at hand.  Hopefully it was a very good learning experience for him; he returned to the kitchen several times in the evening looking for the seed. We have a feeling he will LOVE the sand box this summer.
 
We knew Jonah got birdseed everywhere while he was playing, but the biggest surprise was finding a fair number of seeds IN his diaper when we changed him!  Now that takes talent (and no, he did not eat the seeds).

The ornaments are currently drying and we'll probably hang them next weekend, the next opportunity we'll likely have in the light. I'll post pictures later and will hopefully be able to report on some birdwatching activities as well.