Wednesday, March 7, 2012

Snow painting

This winter has been a shockingly skimpy snow year for us where we live. And I'm not complaining. it also was fairly warm overall this winter. A handful of days where the windchill made the kids cry, that's it.
But... with not much snow, there is not much for the kids to do outside. The ground alternates between mushy and muddy to frozen and filled with sharp ice.  When we got a nice fresh snow cover the other day, followed by only mildly chilly weather, I sent the kids out to play, only to watch them slip on the barely covered ice yard, and not be able to roll up a decent snow ball even. I decided to let them get a little artistic, and paint the yard.
I'd done this before with my older kids, and have once done it during a party where it was so cold the "paint" was freezing before they could even squeeze it out. They had a blast though!
This time I had only two empty bottles that were squeezable, so I poked some holes in the lids, filled them with water and a few drops of food colouring. My little two loved it! They came back for a refill so many times that we ran out of liquid food colouring, as we used up a box of 4 colours-which I don't think I'd even opened before that.  It's good relatively clean fun! And if it's cold enough out, the water freezes and any food colouring that gets on their clothes can be brushed off pretty quickly.