Messy birthday play

I wanted to do something nice for Iz's birthday that was low-key but fun and made the day memorable. For D's last birthday we happened to be in Mystic, CT and went to their aquarium. It was a lovely chilled family afternoon and (imho!) much more relaxing than the tea party we had with lots of other babies for his 1st birthday! But Iz's birthday falls in the summer holidays and so every local attraction/soft play/anywhere was going to be full to the brim with children... So what to do? We love messy play so I thought we'd do something fun at home and try 2 new things I've been meaning to do for ages :)

Flour paint

We've done yoghurt paint (see here) a few times before and I've been meaning to try this for a while - it's perfect as you can make it up in advance but it obviously doesn't need to be refrigerated. It really is as simple as mixing flour and water to make a slightly runny paste and then adding some food colouring - resulting in completely edible paint!

This was a definite hit with them both - next time I might freeze cubes of them and let them have a slightly different twist on the painting with ice cubes that we did before :)

Rainbow jelly/gelatin play

I saw something similar here but I think I was either too impatient when making the gelatin, or the vege-gel substitute (only thing Sainsburys had) isn't as good as proper gelatin or who knows... but the gelatin separated out  slightly from the jelly and so the pieces weren't as firm as I'd hoped and ended up pretty much like regular jelly. But actually I think the more squishy "jelly" texture was much preferred by Iz and D anyway and they loved playing with this.

You can see the gelatin "skin" easily on the orange colour

There was squishing and smooshing. Mixing of colours. Climbing inside for a full body experience. And of course... mandatory eating! 

In the end I actually had to tear D away from playing with it because it started to rain and we were outside - think he would've happily played for hours in it and you could easily extend play by adding some plastic animals or people. I will try making a more "gelatin-y" version of this too - I'm a sucker for anything rainbow after all!

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So that was Iz's messy birthday. It was the perfect way for us to celebrate her turning one :)