Since the weather was cold, rainy and stormy today, we stayed inside and entertained ourselves with some summer themed activities. First, we watched Lilo & Stitch. While the movie itself isn't summer themed, it takes place in Hawaii which immediately invokes thoughts of summer activities - swimming at the the beach, luaus, surfing, alien monsters grooving to Elvis... ok, so not the last thing, but definitely the others.
Then we did something that was totally new for Micah - we painted. A couple weeks ago, I saw a craft kit for kids that had seashells that you put on sea creature shapes and then decorated. I decided to make my own version since we already have all the stuff we would need. The first thing I did was do an image search for various coloring pages of the various sea creatures I wanted - a fish, sea star, turtle, crab & seahorse. I sized them to about 3.5 inches, printed them and cut them out to use as a template. Actually, I couldn't find a crab that I liked, so I drew my own. Then I traced my creatures onto different colors of craft foam sheets and cut them out. Finally, I gathered everything else: paints, brushes and seashells that we collected on our trip to Florida last year.
Next came the fun part - the painting. Like I said before, this is something Micah has never done before, so I wasn't sure what to expect - a mess for sure, but how bad... LOL
Micah didn't quite get the idea of one color at a time and he mixed a lot of his paints before he got them on the sea creature cut outs.
He really got into it though. Both figuratively and literally. We had a lot of paint to wipe off the boy when he was done. He thought it was hilarious and I thought it was pretty funny too.
Laural put a lot of thought into how she wanted to paint each figure. I would post more pics of Laural but since the kids just stripped down to their underwear to paint, I will just post one of the more modest ones.
Painting is done! Micah's are on the left and Laural's on the right. We decided to wait until tomorrow to glue the shells on since some of the paint was pretty thick (especially on Micah's) to give it lots of time to dry.
Finally, to end our day, we went outside to watch the fireflies. We signed up to be "citizen scientists" at https://www.mos.org/fireflywatch/ to observe fireflies in our backyard. This was our second week of observation. The kids really look forward to it! When I told them we would be going out to watch the fireflies, Micah shouted, "Oh yay! I wuv firefwies!" I love his sweet 3 year old enthusiasm! And the cute way he says his Ls like Ws. So, we broke out some more dollar store glow sticks (blue again because according to the Museum of Science website, fireflies don't see blue light) and headed outside to observe. It was quiet (except for the kids arguing about who got to sit or stand where) and we saw loads of fireflies! Such fun! And I never noticed that there were 3 distinct colors of the little buggers until we started watching them. You learn something new all the time, huh?
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