A Week of Play

Earlier this week I indulged in a longstanding wish to introduce my little one to the heavenly mess that paint can create. Given that she's still at the stage where everything has to be explored orally I was afraid of using paints. But then...I made edible paint! Ahh the joy of using common kitchen stuff to create something more!

Anika's first masterpiece!

Anika and I used handfulls of maida (all purpose flour), water and food colors (green, orange, yellow and red) to make delicious paint. We spread out huge sheets of chart paper on the floor, put on our raggedy painting clothes and off we went! The amazed look in her face, the busy activity she got herself into after she saw colors, water and flour, it was all worth every bit of scrubbing we had to do later.

You can imagine the scrubbing this will involve

 Then another day, there were blocks. We scrounged for cardboard boxes around the house. Wrapped them in old newspaper and then painted them with color.

 

Then we were ready for building blocks and tumbling them!

A few months back I had bought small blocks from a toy store but my thirteen month old would just tumble them everytime I staked them up. Using bigger versions of those small blocks is what made all the difference for Anika to start building blocks! What fun!

Exploring her musical toy all by herself!

I love doing new things with the little one. We've got ourselves into this cute routine of spending some mommy-anika time in the evenings when we direct all of that energy into something structured and something "free-style" and then we move into a winding down period of music, slow dancing and then sleeping. And when the clock strikes nine we are in bed, fast asleep. Talk about early to bed!

How do you structure and un-structure play with your little one? I would love to know.

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