You make due with what you have

When you're a single parent, you improvise. When you live in a city apartment, you improvise.

When I got home from work, N wanted to play with water balloons - "right now". But I had to make dinner. He was not impressed (even though he was hungry) so I improvised.

Now dinner is over and he is already clean and in pjs! 

The boys do play with water balloons a lot in our building's back yard but I have to be there with them. I needed to start dinner so we'd have time for more play before bed. This was a work around that worked for all of us. 

A natural

Nathan really is a natural performer. He asked me to "make a movie" of him serving himself a slice of pizza. This is all self directed with no prompting from me!

Painting Fun

A can of shaving cream goes a long way! It's been at least 3 year since I introduced the boys to adding paint to shaving creaming to make dimensional paintings. I still remember the first time too. At first both were hesitant and thrown off the texture. Then they got into it. Really into it. Corwyn painted not only the paper, but the wall, the table the chair and his whole body and head. Nathan got into piling it in the middle and making a big splash.

Yesterday, we finally used the last of that first can of shaving cream.

They started out with 5 colors, but as happens the one that was smeared on top takes over, so the effect was orange. The other colors are on the paper but harder to see. They used glitter glue to keep the peaks and add sparkle.

This time they got into texture. Using their hands, fingers, paint brushes (both as a brush and rolling it around) and some bead squares. In the end, each chose a different style for their finished picture.

 

  
 

I love painting like this. They get to play lots and since there is both washable paint and a soap based product, cleanup is very easy.

Nathan's Work of Art

Corwyn's Finished Product