I took a little unexpected blog break for the last few weeks (minus a tiny post here and there) for a couple of reasons. I’ve been having a lot of fun playing with Lil and don’t find the time to blog about it, and of course we were very sick for a few weeks, and I’ve been playing a lot of Civilization V with my free time.

One of the things that Lil and I have been doing is a lot of art.  These three projects were pretty quick and didn’t get a lot of pictures taken of them so I put them together in one post.  The first up is marble painting, which is something that I’ve seen a lot of on Pinterest.

We took a cardboard box and cut the top flaps off.  Luckily the small posterboard that we buy fit in the box perfectly so all I did was put a few pieces of double stick tape in the corners to make sure the posterboard stayed down.  I put a few globs of paint in box (Lil’s choices) and dropped three marbles in.  Lil was a little unsure of moving the box too much at first so I showed her how to make the marbles roll.  She liked it and thought it was fun, but as with almost all painting that happens here it turned into finger painting.

I kept trying to turn her interest back to the marbles, but she kept going back to painting the box and the posterboard.  I didn’t really mind and gave up after a while.

The next thing we tried isn’t really art so much as a fun homemade toy.  I’m not talking about a hoop and stick (seriously how was that fun, I don’t care if you don’t have electricity, how is hitting a hoop with a stick fun?), we made a poofball popper.   All I had were 7 inch balloons so I used a small yogurt container. I cut the bottom of the yogurt container off and the top of the tied balloon and fit the balloon over the mouth of the container.  I grabbed a handful of poofballs and let Lil go to town.

She had some fun with it so it was worth the two minutes it took to construct, but she got over it very quickly.  She had no interest in popping one poofball at a time so she loaded the entire handful in and popped it. It was a lot of fun to see how far she could get them.

Unfortunately she spent more time pushing the balloon knot back out because every time she pooped the poofballs the knot turned into a innie rather than an outie.

We bought Lil a 1 pound tub of these little beads and I thought she’d love to string them into necklaces and patters, but all she wanted to do with them was make shapes.  I took a few cookie cutters and traced them to make shapes for her.  Then she wanted to make a happy face in the big circle so I free handed a happy face. I’m no artist, that’s for sure.