Messy Friday

The babies are driving me more than a little crazy lately, mainly because, for the past three weeks, one or more of them gets up for good at 5:45 A.M. I try to get them to watch TV on my lap while I fall back asleep on the couch, but usually they are so wide awake that they insist on playing cars or trains or some other activity not suited to a pre-caffeinated state.

I would get Dada to get up with them occasionally, but their sleeplessness has been coordinated neatly with perhaps the busiest time yet in Dada's professorial life. It's just evil, I think, to make him get up so early when his insano workload allowed him to go to bed only three hours before. It would not be exaggerating to say he's worked 80 hours this week. So I make some extra-strong coffee for both adults and drink lots of iced tea myself, toughing it out until their mutual naptime. Then we all crash hard.

With this fantastic new schedule, you can imagine there is a lot of time to fill in the morning. We met AnthonyCarlos at the farm yesterday at 11:30, leaving us nearly 6 hours beforehand with nothing else to do. At one point I was horrified at the thought of playing trains for another second (I know!), and so whipped out my very favorite baby book, which has "recipes" for things to do. Like make-your-own fingerpaints.

The recipe:
3 T sugar
1/2 c corn starch
2 c cold water
food coloring

Mix sugar and corn starch in a saucepan. Add cold water and stir over low heat till thoroughly mixed. Separate and add food coloring, with a drop of detergent to help cleanup.



They turned out pretty runny, more like colored water that left behind a soft and slippery cornstarch residue on the floor. If anybody has a better recipe for homemade finger paint, I would love to have it! But the boys could have cared less. When I suggested they dip the feet of their plastic animals in the paint and then march the animals across the paper, they decided it would be much more fun to bathe the animals in colors. And then to give themselves baths in the colors, splashing their hands and then feet in every color until everything, including the floor, was brown. Their skin looked like marbled Easter eggs.

Once all the "paint" was gone, we still had the cornstarch out and open, so we made Goopy-Goo in the empty paint bowls. Goopy-Goo is basically lots of cornstarch with just barely enough liquid to make it mobile. You can squish it between your fingers, and it runs out in wiggly ribbons. This was when Jacob's attention span had been maxxed out, but here you can see Isaac enjoying, and being coated by, his Goopy-Goo.



Cleaning up the floor was not so bad. The worst part was getting the dye off the boys' skin, for which they had the scrubbing of their lives in the bathtub. In the end, I let them go with green hands, figuring we would only be adding to the base-level of scum with our adventures at the farm.