Finger Paint..

I love finger painting. Quite possibly more than my son loves finger painting. We started finger painting when he was pretty tiny - at first I just added food colouring to whatever he was already mashing around on his high chair tray and let him play. Once he got a bit older, though, I wanted to do some real art projects. These pictures are from a painting-in-the-backyard adventure we had and I am SO glad it was summer so that we did in fact go outside. He was a disaster, the blanket he was on was a disaster, even my husband and I ended up covered in paint. My son was 14 months at the time and everything (seriously, everything) went in his mouth. I wanted to avoid letting him eat real paint because I have a feeling that digesting whatever the hell is in paint is not on the good parenting checklist. So we made our own.

Recipe #1
1.5 cups flour
.5 cups white sugar
1.5 cups water
food colouring
These measurements are really just guidelines - I added more of all three ingredients while I was mixing to get it to the right texture. I made our paint pretty goopy but depending on your preference it can be whatever texture you want. The food colouring is pretty straightforward - add as much as you want in whatever combinations as you want. This recipe made so much paint that we ended up with five containers of different coloured paint.

There is one teeny tiny caveat with this recipe. We got a lot of it in our son's hair. A lot. He and my husband used it like hair gel to make mohawks. And it would not wash out - we drained our hot water tank trying. We ended up giving up and shaving his head. So just a heads up that, while a reasonable 'oops' amount in your hair washes out fine (it all came out of my hair), soaking your whole head in the stuff is a terrible idea. And for the record, his hair grew back. Eventually.