Chocolate Play doh and Bubbles. Oh yes.

I had decided that for the last few days of summer, I was going to leave the choice of activities up to the boys.  I gave them certain guidelines, such as we had to find things at home to do (since I was trying to get them adjusted to being home and not constantly on the go), and it had to involve things we already had.  Pierce and Carter decided they wanted to make play doh, and they wanted to make coffee play doh.  Seeing as my coffee supply was low at the time, and that is my treat in the morning, I convinced them to make chocolate play doh.  Everything else that transpired was thought up by them, and them alone.

Pierce decided that his beloved teddy bear named Mica, was going to have yet another birthday party.  Mica has a lot of birthdays...we have a pretend wooden cake that we purchased from Melissa and Doug, and it sees a lot of action.  Anyhow, he asked me for some candles and beads so he could decorate his cake.  At first, since Carter was occupied with his car at this point, he was not going to share any of that delicious, make your mouth water, play doh.  All I had to do was walk away and suddenly he wanted to share with me.  Yay!  It was so soft, smelled so fantastic, and molded into a perfect birthday cake for his precious bear.

Eventually Carter joined us and had a blast making his own cake as well.  They both became completely engrossed in their pretend play, and even started giving Mica an age (29...thanks for rubbing it in Pierce.  lol).  Pierce man did become a little discouraged that I would not light the candles for him, so he used play doh as his pretend play.  When it came to "blowing" the candles out, he picked the doh off of the candle.  Perfect problem solving.  Go Pierce!

This was all Mommy was allowed to play with...

After about 45 minutes of playing with play-doh, it was time to move on to something new.  I had read on pinterest that if you use a whisk with bubbles, it makes some really awesome stiff peaked bubbles.  And since we had left our dinosaurs out in the mud while we were enjoying ourselves in Rhode Island, it made sense to clean them.  Ta da!  The Dinosaur wash was born.  The boys wanted cups so they could practice pouring, and each of them had their own whisk to make their own bubbles.  They had so much fun, and it was great to watch them learn and explore.  

Once the dinosaurs were clean, we added food coloring to the water, to see what would happen to the bubbles.  They figured out they could make some really cool patterns in the bubbles with the food coloring, and had a blast doing so.  However, I forgot how tall Carter was.  I placed the package of food coloring on the railing while I ran in the house...I came back out 2 minutes later and the color was EVERYWHERE.  Including on the deck that had not been sealed yet.  Oops!  Sorry about that...

It is amazing what these boys will think of when left to their own devices.  I love it.  I hope they never lose their sense of creativity, and the amount of confidence they have to carry on their own experiments.  The world is a classroom, and everything around you can be used in one way or another to learn from.  What are you going to choose today?