Today I did a Pinterest play activity with the kids

So why is this blog-worthy, I hear you ask?

Well, let's just say that I am much better at pinning ideas onto Pinterest boards than I am at actually doing them. I have at least fifty activities pinned up there. This is only the second one I've ever done. It's a rare event.

Today's choice was foam dough. It's messy. I'm not very good at taking photos as I go along (and my hands were very flour-and-foam coated as I was mixing it all together) so there are more detailed instructions and better photos here.

It's not too hard, though. All you do is pour cornflour into a bowl, then squeeze about the same amount of shaving cream in on top of it. Any brand of those will do. Our shaving cream is "Revenge" brand, which gave me a little giggle. Put in food colouring if you like to make your dough coloured, although beware that your hands (and those of the kids) will stay that colour for the rest of the day. Rosie and I are now being blue-handed monsters while the colouring wears off.

Mix it all together with your hands and make it into shapes. It's not quite as moldable as play dough, although that might have improved if I'd kept adding shaving cream to help it hold together. It did get a bit crumbly, but mostly the fun is about squeezing it together and enjoying the messy sensation.

I'm a bit tactile averse to both floury and slimy textures, so it wasn't an entirely pleasant feeling to me. It did get better as the dough held together more. I had to fight the temptation to keep washing my hands. Rosie washed hers about five times so I'm guessing she might have inherited my "don't-like-mess-on-my- hands" genes.

I didn't let the eighteen month old get involved this time, although he didn't seem too interested after a passing look at what we were up to. I thought he might try to eat it and I don't know that eating a mixture of shaving cream and cornflour would be that enjoyable.

But, all in all, it wasn't the worst way to spend a spare half hour on a wet and cold day. And I did manage to grab a few photos after we'd finished so I could blog about it just like all those other crafty Mummy bloggers do.

Making playdough can be very therapeutic

Even if you can't produce the colour requested by the two year old (she wanted orange) because all you have left in the food colouring box is green or blue.

And it was still enjoyable even when, after choosing blue from those two options, she then decided after the colouring was added that she wanted green instead.

I want to make more of it now. I think I will go to the shops tonight and buy up all the different food colourings so I can make a whole lot of batches in lots of colours.

Under the table can be any place you want...

Liam has spent a fair bit of yesterday and today under our dining room table reading his library books. Yesterday he was calling this hiding place a "World War 2 bunker" and today it has been reborn as a campervan. No real obvious differences in what it looks like today compared with how it looked yesterday.

I love the imagination of five year olds.

And a follow up from the previous entry...

Rosie has just rolled across the room to a plastic sword that was lying on the floor (not put away...who would have thought??) and is waving it around.

Having a girl after two boys means that...

People ask you if it's "different" having a girl.

My answer is "not yet." It's just like having a baby rather than a "boy" or a "girl" right now. She's happy to play with whatever I give her, which at the moment is a car with different shapes in it, a musical bus and a tractor.

I guess that will change in future, but for now I'll enjoy the fact that she's happy with the boys' old stuff.