What to do on a Sick Day…

So today Elijah is out of school for a teacher workday.  We were SUPPOSED to go to the railroad museum as a reward for the kids staying in their room all night for 10 nights straight.  HOWEVER, yesterday he woke up from nap with a 102 temp that shot up to 105 before bed.  With IB the fever broke and he slept through the night only waking a few time.  This morning his temp was 103.  Sigh.  So after taking Jerry to work and putting a call into the doc, we came home (doc said wait 24 hours and see how he is in the morning.)  Now I have a well 2 year old and a sick 5 year old… What to do?  First, feed the mama, cause if mama’s hungry NO ONE’S happy.  Second, call Oma and get sympathy!  hehe.  Third, come up with a game plan.  Make some cookies and a smoothie (cause what’s better?), try to get the boy to eat, and come up with something that will keep the kids entertained.  I mean videos only go so far.  SO, I found this site via Teach Preschool on Facebook (if you are a mom or preschool teacher I HIGHLY recommend “liking” them on FB…awesome resource!) and decided to make puffy paint with the kids.  I’m not a huge fan of using foods in crafts or other areas of play, because I feel it’s wasteful to use food that can be eaten… BUT I made an exception this time.  the recipe is 1T self rising flour 1T salt 1 T (we actually used almost 2T) water and food coloring.  We only did four colors and with that we made about 7-8 pictures.  The first ones were pics I copied off the internet.  After they painted we popped the pics in the microwave for 15-20 seconds.  It was pretty cool!
 



So after all the dripping and finger painting and mixing of colors (see we do learn when we play!!) we still had a TON of paint left over.  So we decided to try some other fun things.  We have a couple of bouncy balls lying around (who doesn’t?) and they each happened to have different size, weight, and texture (SCORE!) so we put paper on a jelly roll pan and rolled the balls around in the paint and then on the paper by picking up the whole pan and tilting it around.  Nice marble effect.  We also tried bouncing the balls and rolling them back and forth to each other.  Rather messy, but super fun!  After each one we microwaved the paper and examined the result of the puff.  The larger the blob, the larger the puff!