Homemade Playdough!

I love surfing Pinterest for all sorts of ideas, especially when it comes to activities for Kaitlin to do.

Sometime back, Kaitlin started playing with playdough and I'm not a huge fan of it as it's messy and I always have this fear that Kaitlin would put it into her mouth. As such, there have been times where she wanted to play with it but I would suggest other toys.

Since Kaitlin was about a year old, I had been surfing Pinterest for ideas and one of them was Homemade Playdough! Obviously, it took me forever to try it out with Kaitlin but we finally tried it out a few days ago.

I pretty glad that we are trying it out now too as Kaitlin is at an age where she can observe and help me out. I always like to try and involve Kaitlin in the process so she knows what it's like and not just enjoy the end product. 

There are lots of different Homemade Playdough recipes available on the net, but we followed this one and I think we'll be sticking to if it we want regular playdough! It's so easy to make and I like the consistency of it. It's not too sticky and not much cleaning up is needed (when making and playing with it). According to the site, it takes just 4 minutes to make but I guess cos it was our first time doing it and because Kaitlin was helping out I did let us take some time to do it slowly so we ended up taking a longer time but it was still fun for us! It kind of felt like we were doing some sort of science experiment as we mixed the dry ingredients with the wet ones and watch it form a dough. I know I'm pretty old to find this fun and interesting, but I really did think it was cool that we could make playdough so easily and no baking was required. The fact that the ingredients used were safe and can be easily purchased at a supermarket if you don't already have them in the pantry were an added plus!

The babygirl had fun being my little helper that afternoon! I was able to describe and teach her new terms in a fun and interactive way which was great. I asked her to smell the flour and she said "mmm yummy!" and she went a little too close and got flour on her lips. As I was telling her that she went too close she just licked it off! She enjoyed mixing lots and would readily help do that. I also let her choose the colour of dough she wanted to make so she would feel more involved. Another thing that was funny was when I said "cream of tartar" and she wouldn't stop laughing. I didn't know what was so funny, but hey it cracked her up so that was good! Even after we were done with the activity and I mentioned it she would laugh so hard. This girl has her own sense of humor!

When we were done, I realised we had too much blue dough so I decided to let Kaitlin choose another colour to make. Instead of making a new batch I just split our current batch into half and added a little yellow food colouring and kneaded it while it was slightly warm and it turned green pretty fast. I later tried to add a little more yellow when the playdough had cooled down and the colour of the dough was still able to change.

We've played with the homemade playdough a few times and so far we are loving it lots. If you are wondering how we store the playdough, we just use plastic takeout containers. So far, the playdough works fine when stored this way.

I'm glad and relieved that now I don't have to worry about Kaitlin putting playdough in her mouth. I would still caution and remind her not too but at least I won't have to freak out if she actually does it. Also, apart from playing with the playdough itself,  the process of making the playdough was another fun activity for us and I can certainly see us doing it again!