Planetary Playdough

First off, apologies if you have neither kids, nor grandkids, as this post may bore you senseless.

OK. Summer holidays.

6 weeks and 3 days of time to fill.

I am afraid I am not one of the mummies who is beside herself with excitement at the prospect.
I love my kids, but there is no denying that the holidays can be a somewhat daunting proposition.
I am not good at just ‘hanging out’ with them, and even worse at playing cars or building lego.
I am aware I am painting a picture of myself as a v.bad mummy, but if you can’t be honest on the Internet in front of a potential audience of millions, where can you be..?

So I need some structure.

I decided to give BigSmall free rein to choose a topic he might like to centre our activities on for the next 6 weeks (and 3 days) and he chose….

SPACE!!

I duly hit Pinterest and created a Space Crafts board

What else is a mum to do?
Actually, what did you do in the days before Pinterest. Or even in the days before Google and the Interweb superhighway?
Doesn’t bear thinking about.

So we have already made ‘paint smoosh’ suns,

and today we made planets, from playdough.
Homemade playdough, obviously. This being a year of Make Do and Mend.

There are, at the last count, approximately a 458 recipes out there for homemade play dough.
I used this one here, from Fairy Dust Teaching, and it passed muster with BigSmall, who is a harsh critic of these things.
If making your own playdough seems like a bit of a lame thing to do, then I would suggest you have never made your own playdough.
It is cheap.
It is pretty easy and you probably already have all of the ingredients (if not, keep googling different recipes until you find one that you do have all the ingredients for!).
You can make it as many different colours as you want.
You can add glitter, or bits of flower.
AND when it runs out/gets ground into your carpet/childs hair/clothes, you can just make some more 🙂

Having made the playdough, the Smalls were then let loose making Planets.
It kept both of them happy for at least half an hour, and would have been longer if pesky tea had not been ready and the table needed clearing.

Yes, if you look closely, he does have the remains of a moustache… He was face painted as a Tudor with a beard and a plague scar. Not by me…

The planets!
Hubby was disappointed they weren’t really astronomically correct and weren’t to scale.
Told him he could do it next time…

Half an hour of happily playing children is priceless.
And this playdough is pretty much free.
Happy days! (How many left now..?)