Day 6: There's No Paint Like Snow Paint

I was a little more on track today. I woke up on time, the kids weren't late for school, and I got to drink my entire cup of coffee while only having to reheat it twice. 

Yay, me!

The boys' school had an assembly today, and I had heard from the office a few days ago that somehow by coincidence both of my kids had been selected by their teachers for Stars of the Week. So, Brad left work for an hour and we went to their assembly to see them awarded, and then surprised them with new blankets for their new beds and a bag of chips and (*gasp!*), a SODA (root beer and orange soda), which is a very rare treat for them. 

My little Stars of the Week! Also Camden stamped his face with a stamp before the assembly. Because of course he did. 

After that Brad had to go back to work and I had a solid 3 hours before I had to work, so we crammed it full of as much Christmasness as we could. 

First, we tried our hand at a fun looking Pinterest baking recipe. They are tiny little "hot chocolate mugs", made with sugar cookie (the cup) a mini candy cane (the handle) and chocolate pudding (the cocoa). It's supposed to look like this:

And actually ended up looking like this:

Welp. 

Look. I can basically do just about any paper craft that is thrown at me. But when it comes to cooking, especially fancy baking, I just lack talent. It's just not there. 

For the record, they did taste good. 

So once we tossed that Pinterest-strocity aside, we went back to something I'm actually good at, crafts. 

This is actually two crafts that I merged into one day because it requires the same (bizarre) material: homemade puffy snow paint. It's easy and cheap and only a little messy. 

First, to make the snow paint! Instructions here, taken and adapted from a couple different Pinterest posts:

1. Take a full bottle of Elmer's (or whatever brand) white blue. Put it in the fridge for a couple hours or two to make it "cold". Pull it out ten minutes or so before your craft. 

2. Squirt entire bottle of glue into a mixing bowl. Add equal parts cheapo white shaving cream (I used Barbasol).

3. Mix!

4. Add white glitter for extra fun. 

That's it! It's cold and snowy and dries puffy. Super fun and weird texture. 

Now once you have your paint, you can do all sorts of fun stuff with it. The first snow paint craft we did was make a "melted" snow man, complete with construction paper body parts. This is nothing more than slopping some snow glue on paper and smearing it around (not spreading it too much, or it won't be puffy!) The blobby-er, the better. Then, I had them write out why their snowman melted. It was fun to see their little minds go to work on that. Calen said his snowman melted because someone lit a torch on his head (rude). Camden said his snowman melted because he went inside the oven (lol!). 

This craft was almost too quick, so I quickly added the second craft. Let's make a snowman that isn't melted. 

Same concept, blob some snow paint on some paper and shape it like a snowman. Again, more blob the better. The kids took the reins on this one and Calen started cutting out all sorts of construction paper accessories for his snowman to make him "cool", including a boom box strung around his neck, a sideways hat and crooked stick arms to make him look like he's laying down listening to music. Cam gave his a backpack "full of Star Wars guys" he said. 

Cam's snowman on the left (with backpack), Calen's snowman on the right (with boombox)

The cleanup kind of sucks but not enough to deter me from doing this again. Super fun. 

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