Edible Finger Paint and Other Stories…

My friend Zoe and I had the privilege of hosting the latest Mamma’s and Munchkins!  Besides being a lot of work in an already busy and morning sickly time, it was great to have an excuse for Zoe and I to get together and have a bit of fun planning.  As the last meeting was so intense and awesome, we thought we would have a bit more of a chilled out time where the main focus was on the kids doing activities with their Mommies and the Mommies getting a brief slide show in a few places to take your kids, in and around Cape Town.

We spent most of Friday evening making edible paint (with much thanks to Lauren for the help!  We would have been there all night without her!).  Thankfully Zoe had been saving all of her baby food jars to recycle and this was the best way to recycle them.  We used a recipe that we found on The Imagination Tree, it is:

* 2 cups of corn flour (corn starch in the US I think)
* 1 cup of cold water
* 4.5 cups of boiling water
* Liquid food colouring

Method:
Mix the cornflour with the cold water and stir together – it gets hard to move around the bowl, very weird. Pour in the boiling water and stir between each cup. It goes really strange but keep stirring and it literally seems to “melt” into a wonderful, custard-like consistency. We then separated it into individual jam jars before adding colouring, but you can do it however you like and this is the stage to add colour.

We had such fun making all the different colours…

Finally the morning of the much anticipated and planned for day arrived.  Time to set up!  Unluckily the girls were not with me as they had to go to a family party, it really wasn’t the same without them, but also it was kinda great that I could get everything done.

We set up the creche as the painting room and the main room for the coffee, chats and power point presentation.

Some more of the morning in action.

I just love Leah’s face in this picture!!

When we got home I let the girls have their fun playing with all the paint that we had left over.  And boy was there loads of it.  Here is a tip though.  It is not good after 2 days, unless it was just because of the heat, but on Sunday I thought I would let them have another go.  Oh my flipping word.  The smell that emerged from those bottles was like, and I’ll quote Seth here – the smell of a wet fart that has been sitting for days.  Who knows how that is possible.  But good grief, avoid it at all costs!

Here’s a random pic of the dried bowl that we used the night before to make the colours…  I know I may seem like a nerd, but I like the way it looks…