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Sensory Activity: Shredded Paper

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If you’re afraid of a mess, I have to warn you up front that this is a messy one. But it’s not a dirty kind of mess and if you stick with me here, you might become a shredded paper convert like me. It all started innocently, and rather boring, enough. It was a bill-paying [...]

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Sensory Play with Tapioca Pearls

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Have you ever had Boba Tea or Pearl Tea? You know those chewy, soft balls that sink to the bottom of milky tea that you suck up through a fat milkshake straw? The drink originated in Taiwan as a novelty for children, and has since taken the world by storm with bubble tea houses popping [...]

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Thrifting for the Mud Pie Kitchen

This magnificent butterfly finds a little heap of dirt and sits still on it; but man will never on his heap of mud keep still.  – Joseph Conrad Did you know that yesterday was International Mud Day? One of my fondest childhood memories is pretending to feed my friend Alexandra’s cat the ooey gooey mud pies [...]

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Bird Feeder & Hop Circle

Today I’m sharing two outdoor activities for creative play… #1: Peanut Butter Bird Feeder Our house is shaded by an enormous pinecone-dropping machine, and these little beasts can be found in all corners of our mini-oasis. They are so begging to be turned into something, right? Peanut-butter coated pinecone bird feeders, here we come! (Apologies [...]

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Fake Piped Frosting

Grandma and Grandpa, also known in our house as G-Ma and TD, are here for a long visit and we decided to make some tangerine ginger curd-filled cupcakes to welcome them to town. Our grocery store carries this amazing curd, and it looked like the perfect thing to pipe into our vanilla cupcakes. They were [...]

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Jell-O Excavation

We had fun excavating Jello today… I placed little toy animals in a bundt pan full of Jello, and then refrigerated it overnight. This afternoon, it was open for investigation. Hmmmm, feels kind of funny. “How can I get the animals out?” “With a knife!” A butter knife, of course. Because the allure of plain [...]

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Improvised Caution Tape

My daughter is FASCINATED by caution tape. It all started about a month ago when we walked past a building that was surround with the stuff, and I was barraged with questions like: Why is there caution tape there? Who can go over there? What happened? How did the fire truck get in the building? [...]

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Flour and Water

We recently attended a back-to-school event at my daughter’s preschool, where her teacher shared a funny and inspiring story that involved a messy flour and water sensory activity. With my ears on the alert for fun and thoughtful creativity-builders, I knew immediately that this was something we had to try. It’s unbelievably simple and requires [...]

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Easter in August

After Easter we moved some plastic eggs into N’s play kitchen, and every now and then she’ll ask us to hide them in the garden. One of these rogue eggs has been living in our fire pit for the past month (sadly, we haven’t been roasting marshmallows as much as we’d hoped), and she spotted [...]

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