We put together another homemade Topsy Turvey this weekend to grow bush cucumbers. Not sure if the little guy will grow as Littlebit hugged it. More than once. Our pepper and tomato plant are already responding well and we’ve had lots of rain coupled with bright sun which is helping too. Hopefully I’ll have a success story for you all in a few months. :o)

This week, Littlebit and I made and tried Toddler Safe Paint as featured on Craftblog and as part of Link Love Friday here a few weeks back.

This literally took three minutes to make and that’s only because I didn’t microwave the hot water before I finished mixing in the cold water. I wasn’t too jazzed, personally, with the consistency, but Littlebit thought it rocked the house and fingerpainted the crap out of two dozen sheets of plain white cardstock with it. It literally is something you could make with what you have on hand and would be a great boredom buster if the texture doesn’t freak your kids out. The recipe calls for using two cups of flour, but I only used one which made three toddler sized servings (red blue and green). LIttlebit splashed, smashed and dripped. She LOVED it.

As a note, it’s not hard to clean up, but you MUST do it right away! Otherwise, it makes glue. Brown glue. And requires a scrubbie and a butter knife to get it off of your table.

We tried Ice Cream jell-o as featured on Just Jenn.

Jenn has some fantastically beautiful recipes over on her site that are on my list to check out, but I wanted to do this with the Princess and Littlebit. Overall, super easy, right down to just slicing the ice cream carton in half as Jenn shows. I stuck ours in the fridge after lunch time and it was ready to eat after dinner. However, I wasn’t stoked about the texture. It was a little funny. The kids didn’t mind, but Big Daddy noticed the same thing. It didn’t keep us from eating them and they were actually really tasty, but if you or your kids have texture issues….it was kind of like tofu.

We tried making sponge splash balls from Betz White’s site.

These are a huge hit with both kids and the neighbor kids like them too. Easy to make (we made four in about 10 minutes) and cheap too. However, do NOT cut the long ends of the dental floss. I think the water made the knots worked out and each ball had to be retied. I left the ends long and about quadruple tied it and they’re working great.

And, lastly, we tried Two Bite Breakfasts from the Noshery.

Okay, so mine are ugly, but they tasted good and if you want to see them done up all pretty, Meseidy has a great picture on her blog. Three notes: I did add cheese, but no one could taste it so I’d probably omit it next time because there’s no need to add the extra fat/calories for something no one could taste. Second, my eggs needed TWICE as long to cook as noted in the recipe. Lastly, don’t over cook your bacon. Trust me. It makes it impossible to mold them into your muffin cups.

B ut, everyone liked them and said they’d eat them again and they really didn’t take very long for a Sunday morning breakfast. They looked neat and weren’t complicated, which is a really good thing.