Category Archives: Eco Friendly Parenting

Slime – Another Easy Last Minute Gift to Make for Your Kids

I just posted about making play dough as a Christmas gift for your kids. You can do the same with the ingredients to make slime. I will warn you, however… slime is NOT nontoxic, at least not with the recipe I have.

2 cups water
1-1/4 cup Elmer’s glue
food coloring
1/3 cup hot water
1 tsp Borax

Thoroughly mix 2 cups water with glue. Add food coloring as desired.

Mix hot water and Borax. Stir into glue and water mixture, removing slime as necessary. You may have to make an extra batch of the hot water and Borax to make the entire mixture into slime.

The slime will be rather tacky at first. The more you work it, the less tacky it will be.

To give this as a gift I would suggest giving the kids just the glue and tell them it’s for a special project. Packaging up the rest of the ingredients just wouldn’t work for me.

Slime is rather messy of course, but if you clean up promptly it’s not likely to stain. At least it hasn’t for me.  Don’t let it near carpet as it’s not so easy to clean up there.  Tile floors are a much better choice for this one.

As with the play dough, keep it sealed up and it will last a while. Your patience with whatever mess they create may be another matter.

Homemade Play Dough – An Easy Last Minute Gift to Make for Your Kids

Kids want so much for Christmas, especially if they watch much television at all. They see all the cool toys out there. But sometimes one of the best gifts  can be one you make yourself.

Homemade play dough is a great choice for kids in the right age group. They love it.

My plan this year is to prepare a couple containers of dry play dough ingredients and have a part of the gift being getting to choose the colors they make while spending time with Mommy. It’s a really inexpensive gift, and the ingredients I need are right on hand. Here’s my recipe:

2-1/2 cups flour
1/2 cup salt
1 tbs cream of tartar (optional but helpful)
1-1/2 cups hot water
3 tbs cooking oil
Food coloring
glitter (optional but pretty)

Mix dry ingredients together. Separate into containers if you want to do multiple colors. Add oil and food coloring to each batch. If you’ve separated colors, estimate the right amount of oil for each. Add hot water slowly and mix until the consistency is right. Too much water makes dough gooey and less fun to play with. But you can always add extra flour to work it out.

We like this recipe because it lasts a long time. Keep it in a sealed container. Refrigeration is helpful.

If you don’t add the glitter this is of course completely nontoxic, which is nice. Especially if you’re like me and have a near toddler to deal with as well as the older children.

Encourage the Kids to Make Christmas Gifts

There are a few things that are true about most kids, especially younger ones.

  1. They love to make crafts.
  2. They love holidays.
  3. They don’t have much of their own money.

Put it all together and what do you have? The perfect excuse to have them make the Christmas gifts they give.

Gifts don’t have to be complex. Last year my kids made frames out of wooden craft sticks, with magnets on the back so they could be stuck on the fridge. They painted them and added glitter because, well, it wouldn’t be a fun craft in their view if things didn’t go just a little overboard.

craft stick framesThe frames are really easy to make. You’ll need:

4 or 8 craft sticks, depending on if you want a single or double layer to the frame.
Glue
Photograph to be framed
Paperboard or thin cardboard
Magnet (strong enough to hold the whole thing up)
Decorating supplies

Have the kids glue them into approximately a square. Don’t fuss about perfection, these are kids and a little off looks good. My kids like to do the double layer frame.

Allow the glue to dry, then let the kids decorate the frame as they please.

As the decorations dry, you can cut the photograph to fit the frame. Glue its back to the paperboard and attach the magnet to the back.

When everything is dry, glue the photo into the frame.

There are many other crafts kids can easily make that will be appreciated by grandparents and other relatives. Having them make the gifts encourages them to give things that have more meaning, rather than spending a dollar or two on what appeals to them at that instant at the store.

It’s Amazing How Few Toys Kids Really Need

We’ve been in this house several months now. It’s nice having all the space but what has been most interesting is how few toys my kids really need in order to have fun.

You see, we’ve hardly unpacked any of them. They’re still in boxes in the garage.

I’ve known for a long time that most toys pretty much don’t get played with. That’s just how kids are. They have the favorites and then the toys that come out once in a long while.

Yes, they have asked for their toys sometimes. Not often at all though.

And there are a few that I really do want to get out for them, especially the wooden train set and more of their crafting supplies.

With the holidays fast approaching, it’s a good reminder that they really don’t need a ton of new toys to have fun.

They will be getting some, but so far we have a bit of a fun science focus. My kids love to do “science projects” and I would like to encourage that. We’ve gotten some good deals for them.

Probably after Christmas we’ll get around to going through those boxes and really push the kids on getting rid of the stuff they just don’t need. There are other children more in need and who would really appreciate the things mine aren’t paying attention to.

Working on a Bit of Early Potty Training

Much as I love my cloth diapers over disposables, I do sooooo look forward to being done with diapers altogether.

I mean really. I’ve been dealing with diapers almost continuously since my oldest was born, about seven and a half years ago. Small breaks between each baby, but not enough. Really, not enough.

How I wish we had discovered the delights of cloth diapering sooner.

In the early days, my husband wouldn’t hear of it. It was a tv show about how much waste the things we use produces that showed it for disposable diapers that finally got him on my side. Now he wishes we had done it throughout.

But I’m really ready for potty training. Selene may be only 10 months old, but we’re doing some gentle work with it.

What got us started was noticing that she tends to pee after she and I take a shower in the morning. Bringing her in is just easier than waiting for her to nap, and I obviously cannot leave her in the charge of her older brother, who is only 4, and my oldest daughter is generally at school at the time, and really not ready for that responsibility either.

So, noticing a trend, out came the potty training seat.

She promptly quit peeing right after a shower for a few weeks.

But now she’s doing it again, and yes, in the potty. She doesn’t have it down yet, but she is becoming more aware that her body is doing something and that she gets praised for it. She gets a bit of praise just for sitting there, of course. But I’m getting some awfully big grins when she realizes that she has done something more in there. And she claps for herself.

We’re not aiming for complete training at this point. With three kids it would take more time than I’m up for to do a complete job. I’m just aiming for a relatively young potty training with her getting comfortable with the idea now.

I hope.

My mother likes to talk about how my grandmother always had babies trained by six months old. Of course, disposable diapers weren’t so common then, and I would imagine washing diapers would be a bit more time consuming. That would certainly be motivation, no matter the number of kids.

People do potty train young like that still, and I understand it works. The currently popular name is elimination communication. But I wasn’t ready to go for it then, and am still not ready to go for it now.