Pasta Mania

New plaything. Yet another thing I learnt from the parenting course I attended some weeks back. After their naps in the afternoon, I try to let them have something fun to play with or to do. So we either make milk shakes, do art or garden related stuff. I like giving them things to do to occupy themselves independently of us. I think it's important for them to play on their own without adding us into the fray.

So, previously, it was beans. Beans rather than sand because they are colourful and clean up isn't quite as painful as if it were sand. Plus, the beans that we miss, 2 days later, we re-visit and I show them how it's become a plant, not that they care. To them, it's all the better to stomp on.

But one thing I've learnt about kids. You can't give them the same thing to play with all the time because they get bored. So I decided to mix it up a little and give them beans but add on to it. This took a bit more work than the beans which I just bought and mixed together. This required me to buy some raw materials, weird obscure ones at that and put it together.

I needed
- a bag of pasta
- some food colouring
- some rubbing alcohol
- a ziploc bag (I used clean transparent plastic bags and they worked as well)
- a roll of paper towel
- a pair of disposable chopsticks.
- a large metal tray

What I was going to do was rather than just give them plain wheat coloured pasta to play with, I would colour the pasta.

Step 1:
- Put pasta into the plastic bag/ ziploc bag, add some rubbing alcohol in and then add food colouring.
- The amount of colour to be added in depends on the intensity you want the colour to turn out.

























Step 2:
- After you've put your pasta in and poured your colouring out, you shake it all about.
- Line a tray with paper towels, a few times over so that the colour doesn't seep through.
- Pour out the coloured pasta and spread them out so that they dry out evenly.
- Leave to dry.
- The alcohol on it causes the pasta to dry relatively quickly.
- You can tell it's dry when the colour dulls down a little and is no longer glossy.

The good thing about colouring the shells this way and letting the kids use the shells as play things is that even if they swallowed it, everything is edible. Pasta, colouring and the teensy bit of rubbing alcohol that would have vapourised by that point.




















Step 3
- Time to play!

I inflated the pool so that we could contain the mess and gave them a couple of scoops, containers and spatulas to play with. Because they fight over everything, I made sure there were enough similar containers to go round so neither could justify snatching. So there was much pouring, throwing and inadvertently stomping.




















































The thing about pasta shells is that it doesn't take well to being stomped. It breaks up. Jordan looks like a Mini Godzilla in mid growl because she got some stuck to her foot. So, I put shoes on them after that and they were quite happy playing Godzilla and stomping on everything.

This kept them busy for a good 45 minutes while I got to get some rest. After the gastric flu debacle, I was warned that with a virus in my body, I'd more likely than not manifest another virus led ailment. And true enough, my nose and throat have added themselves into the ill mix and requiring me to lie down a lot. Something that is hard to do with 21-month-old Energizer bunnies. So whatever reprieve the pasta/ bean combination allowed me, was much welcomed.

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