This has been a very hot summer for many places, luckily for us, the pacific northwest was not one of those places. We have had a very mild summer, gloomier and rainier than usual. We have had some hot days, and on those days it is hard to escape the heat because we don't have air conditioning! In fact, most people around here don't. I was dreading the weather on our trip to the southeast (it was over 100 degrees some days during our visit) but the miracle of a/c made it more bearable than our mild northwest summer. On the hot days, I have tried to do activities to help keep us cool. One item that Zel had a lot of fun with was colored ice cubes. This is a super easy activity to prep. Just drop some food coloring into ice cube trays and add water then freeze. After the cubes were frozen, I put them in a bag so that I could reuse the ice trays. If you don't like to use food coloring you could also use juice, but your colors won't be as bright.
For our first experience, we did colored ice art. I gave Zel a piece of construction paper to draw on using the ice. He tried this at first but then experimented with the ice in many different ways.
We talked about how cold the ice was and how it melted from our warm hands. He said the word "ice" over and over then started morphing it into the word "eyes." So he put the ice on his eyes and on mommy's eyes. Then he tried the ice on as a hat too.
I told Zel that I hid an M&M inside one of the ice cubes. Then of course he tasted all of the ice cubes to try to find it!
Zel put all the ice cubes back in the bowl and started shaking it. Since he was using a metal bowl, it made a loud clanging noise which he absolutely loved.
I brought out a towel so that Zel didn't slip on any water and he used it to play peek-a-boo with the ice. Then he thought it was hilarious to hide the ice with his face.
Zel wanted to move out of the kitchen and began carrying the ice cubes into the living room by balancing them on his spoon. I loved this impromptu motor skills practice. I was very impressed about how few times he dropped the ice.
I had some colored ice left over, so I brought them out another day to entertain Zel while I exercised. I laid out a blanket in the living room and gave him some kitchen tools, a cup, bowl, baking sheet, and muffin tin.
Zel had a lot of fun moving the ice between the various containers. He filled the little cup, then placed one ice cube in each spot of the muffin tin.
While I was on vacation in South Carolina, I helped my mom with some babysitting. It was very hot there, so I thought the ice would be a perfect activity. My mother didn't have food coloring so we used apple juice, cranberry juice, blackberry juice, and coconut milk to make different colors. We set out a bunch of metal bowls, muffin tins, spoons, and tongs. The kids had a blast! They loved trying to use the tongs and of course sucking the juice out of the ice cubes. I gave the older kids some eye droppers and warm water and showed them that they could use it to melt the ice.
Colored Ice is a great way to beat the heat and have fun learning about colors, numbers, and temperature!
Feeding a toddler can be difficult. Some days Zel is a never ending abyss eating anything and everything, while other days he seems to survive off of a few bites of food. Forcing food upon your child never works, so parents have to figure out gentle (or sneaky) ways to encourage their child to eat. One way that I do this is by letting Zel make his own sandwiches. I cut up some bread and gave him a heaping spoonful of peanut butter and a child sized butter knife. I showed him how to use the knife to spread the peanut butter on the bread then let him try it by himself. Sometimes it takes a little restraint to stop myself from doing it for him or keeping him from getting too messy, but I find that he enjoys the food so much more when he does it all by himself. This is also great fine motor skills practice too!
