I try to keep our lives as chemical free as possible and making the things Lil likes to play with is one easy way to accomplish this. She loves to blow bubbles and we are just about out of the bubble solution that I bought last year so I started searching the grand interwebs to find homemade bubble solution recipes.

From what I see so far they are mostly the same just the amounts very from recipe to recipe. They usually include water, soap and glycerine to give the bubbles strength I guess. Most of the recipes I’ve seen online call for Dawn or joy or some other main stream dish washing soap. We don’t have that on hand and using it would sort of kill the chemical-less aspect of this experiment. I do have Dr. Bronners castile soap so I used it. The recipes often call for distilled water, but I just used our purified water, I’m a rebel at heart. I don’t know what the deal is with distilled water and don’t feel like looking it up right now, I also doubt I’ll be buying a gallon of it anytime soon. I’m cheap like that and well lazy, mostly lazy and forgetful. Anyway, our water is purified and wonderful so that’s what I’ll be using for now.

Our first bubble experiment was bust, pun intended. I’d say that the solution I made was about 10% successful. Which translates to a lot of wasted breath.

If anyone is curious, and so I know what I did this time here’s what I used.

Bad bubbles:
1 cup water
2 tablespoons glycerine (plus an extra squeeze after I realized how bad they sucked, it didn’t help)
6 tablespoons Dr. Bronners soap

Mix everything together gently until well mixed. Try not to make too many bubbles while doing this. That’s it.

The positive of this whole thing was that Lily and I now have a problem to concur and we will and we had a lot of fun trying to get the bubbles to blow and mixing the solution.

Sorry the pictures were taking with my phone in my oddly dark bathroom.

YAY! One of the few bubbles.

Next time I make them I’m going to use some of the dish soap my Mother-in-law gets at the health food Co-op.  It bubbles like crazy and is very good chemical-wise.  I think I’ll try different portions too.

I am also on the hunt for good bubble wands. I need to find a wire hanger, but I don’t even know if those exist anymore.  I hear that wire hangers and pipe cleaners make good bubble wands.  We will find out.

Lily has been painting pictures since she was a year old, but I’ve only ever had one or two displayed and rarely if ever change them out.  I have been looking for some way to display more of her pictures, but hadn’t found anything that I just loved and was within my skill level.  Finally I realized that I could take a piece of what I saw here and there and make it mine.  I had this very large blank wall in our Family Room that I needed to do something with and inspiration hit me over the head.

We stopped at Lowe’s and grabbed some 3m Command hooks (love those things) and some lovely colored twine and got to work.  Thankfully Waldo had the brains enough to use a tape measure to make sure everything was straight, because that’s just not how I roll, I eyeball everything and it shows.

Lil loves being able to see her (and Daddy’s and Grandma ReRe’s) art.  The pictures are held with large paperclips for now. I’m debating changing to clothes pins, but not sure.  I’m afraid the clothes pins might distract.

Like a lot of kids I’m sure Lily is always trying to get our scissors.  She sees us using them and wants to try.  Of course we take the scissors away and try to explain.  When all of the school supplies started popping up at Target I noticed a set of kids scissors and grabbed them.  I think they are labeled for 3 or 4 year olds, but I’m a rebel and got them for my 2 1/2 year old.  Because of the move and whatnot the scissors have been in my craft tub for a month or two.  Well last week I got them out and Lily was so excited to try them.

I didn’t have to give her much instruction.  I think she’s been paying attention when we use them because she pretty much knew exactly what to do with them.

She is mostly doing single cuts so far.

I tried to show her how to make one cut after another to you know cut the paper in half or something, but she is much more into fringe right now.

In the week or so that we’ve had the scissors in our lives, we’ve had many “cutting days” (her name for it) and she’s progressed from just fringe to confetti.

OMG the small triangles, they are all over the floor. I think they might be taking over the world.

I was at Boarders the other day stalking their 30% off kids books and found a art smock and fingerpaint paper pad that I just couldn’t pass up.  I am sick and tired of using my old t-shirts for Lil’s craft covers.  They do a crappy job and occasionally I need to wear the shirts again and lo and behold they are stained with washable paint.  I think the smock and the paper pad were about $4 a piece and I found out they are totally worth it.

My little artist

We started out with some slick stick crayons. (I highly recommend these crayons.  The colors are bold and bright.)

Next came the paint.

I decided to do a folded butterfly painting and Lily was all for it.

I don’t think she had enough paint on the paper because when I pressed the pages together there was hardly anything on the second side.

So Lil added more paint. (apparently I didn’t get any pictures of the finished butterfly.)

I realized that Lily mostly fingerpaints with her palms, so I showed her how to just use her fingertips.

Lots of circles and spirals were the outcome.

I am so happy with the smock.  It kept Lily clean and was easy to clean off.  I totally wish I would have broke down and bought one months ago.

Last week Lily was bored and I had just finished working so I got into my crafting tub and at first I thought about letting her paint and then I noticed the stickers Waldo picked out for her while we shopping.  I decided that a collage would be a better idea.  I had a couple pieces of tissue paper and this kind of shiny, slick, red on one side and silver on the other side scrap of wrapping paper left, so I grabbed them, some small squares of poster board and a glue stick.

I set Lil up at the kitchen table and set to work cutting pieces of the paper for her and explaining what to do.  She’s done a collage before, but it was a while ago so I gave her a small refresher course.  She caught on right away.

I could not convince her that stickers don’t need glue. I was a little surprised that the stickers stayed on because the paper was so wet from the glue.

Lily is really figuring out what being two is all about the last couple of weeks. And the morning of the collage was an especially trying morning and taking a little break to do something fun with Lily was all it took to turn our day around and made all the difference in the world.