Painting the Outdoors

We actually started out with paint, paper, smocks and an easel outside on a beautiful spring day this past week. The girls loved the new inspiration of the outdoors.

Throughout the week, however, painting the outdoors took on a whole new meaning.  For Christmas this past year, Nonna and Ga had given our family a slate garden fountain.  Looking for something to do outside the other day, I thought we could set this up together. 

The girls thoroughly enjoyed giving it their own extra touch of added rock decor and then sat back and simply took in its tranquil sound and vision.

Inspired by a conversation I'd had with my mother-in-law, I ran inside and grabbed a couple of paint brushes.  I didn't even have to explain.  The girls immersed the brushes in the water and immediately started "painting" everything in sight: the plants, the rocks, the sidewalk, our house. 

They were at it for what seemed like forever!  I finally had to coax them inside for a late lunch before nap time.  Painting with water - brilliant!  They LOVED it.  I can see a lot more of this in the future sunny days to come!

This One's For the Birds

With the weather finally starting to feel like spring, the girls and I needed a project to help get us in the mood even if the rain was keeping us indoors.  These two simple activities were perfect!  I'm sure you've seen them a million times, but kids love them, so why reinvent the wheel?

We first created a "Nest Helper" for the birds.  This was easy, but perfect for my almost two and three-and-a-half-year-old, and the set-up took almost no time at all.  I simply purchased a suet cage (under $2 at Home Depot) and found some leftover yarn in my crafting supplies.

To make the small pieces of yarn, I quickly wrapped the yarn around a stack of 5x7 index cards about 50 times.  I then cut through all of the strands to get 50 longer pieces of string.  They looked a little long to me, so I cut them in half again to make 100 shorter pieces. 

I repeated this with a few different colors of yarn (chosen by my girls) until we had enough yarn to fill up the suet cage with.  I mixed them all up to make a big pile for the girls to grab at and place in the cage as they wanted.

Unfortunately, I was too busy enjoying the moment to take pictures of them actually putting the yarn in, but it was a joint effort, and they had so much fun.  I was worried it'd be too simple, but they loved it and couldn't wait to go hang it out on the tree!

After that, they ran inside and my oldest said, "What's next, Mama?"  Luckily, I had the homemade bird feeders all set up to make too.  I didn't take any pictures of this activity, unfortunately, because it requires lots of hands-on attention (with the ages that I'm working with)!  I'm sure you've all familiar with the drill though: pine cones, string, peanut butter and bird seed (or raisins if you don't have seeds).

**I would have loved to have collected the pine cones as part of the activity, but it was way too wet...hopefully next time.

I tied the string on the pine cones BEFORE the peanut butter went on so as to minimize the mess.  Once the strings were on, each of my girls got a small (baby) spoon of peanut butter to spread onto their pine cones.  With a little help, they covered them with a sufficient amount.  We then rolled the peanut butter-covered pine cones in the prepared bowl of bird seed until there was no peanut butter showing and set them on a paper towel while we repeated the steps until all of our pine cones were done.

The best part was trekking out into the yard to find the perfect tree to hang our bird feeders on.  We decided to put them near the "Nest Helper" so that the birds will notice that it's there (and we can see it from our window).  The girls chose the branches and I tied the feeders onto them with the string.  It was sprinkling out, but that didn't dampen our moods at all!

After that, I got another, "What's next?"  I didn't have anything planned, but luckily we had some popcorn, a dull needle and leftover string.  Next on the list is popcorn string to hang on some of our pine trees!