Valentine's Day Sensory Bin

I love sensory bins. I love coming up with themes for them, searching out treasures for them, putting them together, and playing with them. Monster, however, is almost 2 and doesn't always have the same love for them that I do. Sometimes I make one that is a big hit and he plays with it happily for a while but other ones are epic failures that he doesn't want anything to do with. If I had a bit more sense I would probably give up on sensory bins for a while but they're so much fun for me to play with that I just can't do it. Instead I just try to figure out what will appeal to him based on what he's been into lately and go from there.
This bin is a bit different because it's Valentine's Day themed as opposed to being related to something he's obsessed with (on a related note, when I figure out how to make a Special Agent Oso-themed bin I might just convert him to the wonders of the sensory bin). I threw this bin together in a couple of minutes - Monster was bored so I searched through my mini toy collection and put a quick bin together while he ate a cookie. It's not fancy or particularly involved but he played with it for longer than some of my other attempts.

The base is just plain white rice - if I had planned to make the bin I probably would have made some pretty pink or red rice. I pulled red and pink feathers and pom poms from a mixed bag of each. The tiny koosh balls were part of a pack from the dollar store (dollar store party favors are amazing for sensory bin add-ins) and the shiny purple & green balls are crinkly cat toys that I found when I was cleaning our kitchen. The teddy bear was one that Monster already had laying around. My favourite parts are the little pink & red hearts, kitten, and bird. They're magnets from Superstore that were part of my mom's Valentine but they matched so well that I had to open the package and add them.
Making this bin definitely taught me that keeping containers of sensory bin toys so that I can throw together a quick activity is a great idea - having a meltdown distraction or something to keep me sane while I make supper is never a bad thing.

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.