mixing stuff together... messy!!!

[One Art]

do any of your dc mix anything they can get their hands on? My dd was sneaking away with lotion, baby oil, hand sanitizer, anything she could reach in the kitchen(like spices)... and making "concoctions" that smelled soooo nasty and crusted to everything.... so anyway, I wasn't thrilled with her using household stuff, and even though we tried to keep most of it out of reach it was never quite possible... so I took her to the dollar store recently and bought a bunch of really cheap flour, spices, etc that she could use... so she hasn't been using household stuff anymore, but the messes are just as nasty.... I actually just got her to help clean up one of them, but I am wondering if there are other things I could give her that wouldn't be so nasty when mixed with water? Also, is it just a phase? I have her help me bake a lot, but she gets frustrated that she can't just add what she wants in the amounts she wants....

[1xmom]

My dd LOVES to make "science experiments" and it actually keeps her entertained for quite a while. Going to the dollar store to stock up on her stuff is a good idea. I'm going to have to keep that in mind.

[babygirl24]

She sounds very creative! Sorry I am not any help. Good luck!

[Aridel]

My dd does the same thing, and calls all of her mixtures her 'potions.' Half the fun seems to be the nastiness of the potion at the end, what seems to work best is setting the area up for easy cleanup - newspapers over the table etc.

[azjen43]

Yep. My DD, who just turned 4, does the same thing. She calls them her recipes. For a while, it was just soap, lotion, sunscreen, and the like, then she moved on to making "Smoothies": adding yogurt and cinnamon to her milk or juice or even water and shaking it up. Let's see...."soups" consisting of any liquid she can get her hands on mixed with any food still on the table after we have finished dinner and are sitting around talking...... It does make a pretty big mess, not to mention wasting alot of food, soap, lotion, whatever.... So, we try to remove any food left on the table as soon as she's not actively eating any more. Ive found that giving her lots of different bottles and tubes and squirty things and pouring containers in the bathtub or the backyard wading pool satisfies her somewhat, although she has been known to go through an entire bottle of shampoo in a single bath and then needs a thorough shower to rinse it all off. Her newest creation: sidewalk chalk, mixed with water and sunscreen , sprinkled with flower petals and sand, which, when dried, really does look pretty on the back patio. We joke that she's going to be either an avant garde artist, a chemist, or a bartender when she grows up.

[HappyNewMama]

My ds (almost 4yo) does this, too. I can't blame him I know I would have done it when I was little if I could've--in 5th grade my best friend and I used to mix all kinds of random stuff together in the kitchen after school. I thought it was great fun then, but I'm surprised that our little ones who are so young are having so much fun doing this. We call them experiments or contraptions in our house. One annoying thing is I have to keep a tube of ds' toothpaste hidden because that's his favorite thing to play with these days (and if I didn't hide some we wouldn't have any left to brush his teeth with). Before bed tonight he came and told me: "I'm making a weather-changing contraption. I need something that's the best thing you've ever tasted in your life. And it will change the weather. When it's dry I'll put this on the rope and it will make it wet. It's got 2 animals, a brown animal and a yellow animal. It's the Little Bear toothpaste, you've never tasted anything like this." When he plays play-doh/clay he puts things into it, toothpicks, marbles, the jar lids, etc. and calls them his sculptures. Masking tape is another of his favorite things to make 'contraptions' with (basically just unrolling a whole roll of tape and sticking it to everything in sight--though I'm sure to him it's much more detailed and complicated than that!).

[dharmamama]

Can she work outside?

Namaste!

[MtBikeLover]

My DS does this too. He gets a pot, puts something from the cabinet in it and adds water. He calls it dessert and we all pretend to have a little. I usually give him some old dried food that I know I will never use and he cooks with that. He's used a box of rice-a-roni, old animal cookies, old chocolate cookies, some dried cereal, etc. He also likes to freeze things so he will get grapes and put them in water and stick them in the freezer. Yesterday he did it with popcorn kernels.

I put a towel underneath or tell him he has to mix it in the sink so that it minimizes the mess.

I love the idea of the dollar store - I will have to do that!

[cyncyn]

Oh yeah, my dd loves to mix up stuff too. I try to keep it outside if possible. We have a "play kitchen" (a wooden box and a broken toaster oven) set up out there with old pots and pans, shaker jars of expired herbs and stuff I clean out of the cupboards periodically. The main problem is keeping the dog from eating her "soups".

Inside she will use a whole roll of tape and 100 ft. of string making a "machine". I try to indulge her if I can. I remember my grandma letting me make 3-d shapes out of newspaper completely covered in masking tape, with a drinking straw to inflate/deflate.

Got to love the kid creativity!

[AllisonK]

DD does this and I let her bake them. If its all food she can eat if she likes. Great homeschool project we do it at least once a week. Last week it was flour, powdered sugar, frapachino mix, baking soda, and salt. YUCK!

[Thao]

Really, consider yourself blessed that you have such a creative daughter. And she is blessed to have a Mom that doesn't try to squash her creativity.

My dd is 7 and still loves this game. I get comments all the time about how creative she is and it is true. She doesn't like playing board games or cards that have rules. She just takes blocks or yarn or paint or foodstuffs or what-have-you and makes something wild out of it. I figure, if at 7 she's thinking outside the box with crafts and food, by 37 she'll be thinking outside the box with physics or art and really do something important.

As for the mess, maybe you can make the cleaning up part of the game? Put on your favorite music and dance around while cleaning it?