Dyed Memory...

So...in the spirit of New Mexican politics, today I'm keeping the post all in the family and giving them preferential treatment because I just get to do that. :)  My younger sister Carolyn submitted a Pinstrosity that she ended up with when she tried an activity from the blog about baby/toddler playtime activities that another one of my younger sisters writes. 

I am the oldest child and got married first, but 2 of my younger sisters soon caught up, got married, and passed us in the "family development" department and I now have 3 nephews between them. This has worked out great for me because for once I don't have to be the pioneer. I get to watch what they do and learn from their adventures in kid-land! My sister Diedre has a degree in Early Childhood Education and started a series on her personal blog about what kids learn from various playtime activities. We all convinced her that she should start a separate site/blog specifically about these activities and it has been fun to watch her build the site, add the activities, and to learn what these activities help babies/toddlers learn from just normal playtime activities. My sister Carolyn has used some of those activities with her 2 boys and I'm sure I'll use some with Merle when he comes along. Carolyn was looking for something to do to entertain her oldest boy (2 yrs old), and turned to her Pinterest boards and found one she had pinned from Diedre's Playing to Learn blog and decided to try out this activity:

The Original Pin:

http://weplay2learn.blogspot.com/2013/04/rainbow-spaghetti.html

Rainbow Spaghetti! For eating, for playing, for discovering. She had read through the directions when she first pinned it and figured she could recall the process from memory. She did pretty good, but got two steps jumbled together instead of keeping them separate. The instructions say to boil the pasta with food coloring, adn then afterwards add some oil to keep the noodles from sticking together. Carolyn added the oil while the noodles were cooking instead. She said, "So I separated the pasta into thirds, added a few drops of coloring, red, blue, and green, and about a half tablespoon of oil.  I started to mix it together and the color didn't spread very well.  The problem was that the oil kept the color from spreading well."

The Pinstrosity:

So the coloring process didn't work real great, but she forged on anyway. After the pasta was done cooking and half dyeing, Carolyn says she "mixed all the colors together in my large pot, and placed it on the floor.  It took a minute or two for Wyler to get in there and play with it.  But when he did the spaghetti was flung across the kitchen floor. No big deal, vinyl floors are easy to clean... except picking up angel hair spaghetti, that is a little oily isn't the easiest.  Especially when a two year old empties the pot before you can put a handful back in the pot.  So now my floor is nice and oily.  Next time I am going to put a sheet down first.  Keep the oil mess contained better, and I can shake the pasta off into my compost pile."

So this was a great activity for Carolyn and Wyler...they both got to learn, lol. Most of us on here are guilty of just winging a project we read the directions for way back sometime...and sometimes it works out and other times we end up having to improvise or throw away. But that is part of the learning process, and there's nothing wrong with it. I end up having to improvise quite often, but I have learned some great new things to do (and things not to do) that I wouldn't have learned otherwise. I know there are some of our readers who are driven batty when someone wings it, but personally I think it's a great part of life to be able to explore, exercise our brain, and adventurize. I'll probably wing things my whole life. Now, I'm not saying throw out the instructions every single time...trust me, I love a set of well written instructions. But sometimes you just have to deviate a little. Are you not the wing-it type? That's okay. We like you just as much as we like the wing-it lovers. We all have our own method of learning, discovering, and creating.

I hope you all have a great Thursday! I'm off now to get my house ready for Diedre, our Mother-in-Law (Diedre and I married brothers), and my nephew to come visit for a few days. Mostly that just means making sure I put away my craft paints and Cameron's knives out of Erik's reach. It's liking going on a treasure hunt through my house, hahaha.