Ages ago I saw that Karen at Let Kids be Kids had a fab idea for making indoor snow using shaving foam and the wonder that is cornflour. We’ve not really used shaving foam yet in our messy play so immediately pinned it and decided to have a go too. I even bought the shaving foam and bits ready, but you know things get busy sometimes, and it just never happened. I also knew it had to be at a time when I was fully committed to Monkey getting really messy, and to dealing with the clean up afterwards! Possible one of the reasons for not attempting it.

One rainy day recently I mentally geared myself up to do it with him…. then we got an invite out with a friend and her little one, and as I like to have company and get out as much as possible, we jumped at the idea. But having geared myself up for the messy play I was slightly disappointed that it wasn’t going to happen.

I have been trying to give Monkey an activity to do every afternoon after his nap at the moment, as we were finding he was sat in front of the TV snacking and then not wanting to eat his dinner, whereas if I keep him occupied he forgets about snacking and can then hold on until teatime/ The problem is that at my current point in this pregnancy I am absolutely shattered in the  late afternoon, around 5 pm ish, and sometimes have dizzy spells, so it can  be a bit tricky keeping him occupied when I am at my lowest ebb.

But that afternoon I went it for it. We came down after a few stories in his bedroom after his nap, and decided to get stuck in. I decided the kitchen was probably the safest bet for this activity, with the foam element, as at least we were near a sink and various towels etc! I’d also asked daddy to get the baby bath out of the loft as I thought that is a good size as a tub for him to lean in and get stuck in with.

We started off with foam, which Monkey really liked the feel of (I just used a value brand for cheapness).

We then added a load of cornflour. I was a bit vague on quantities so just added more and more gradually, talking about how it felt each time. (Me doing the talking, Monkey isn’t at that stage yet – when I sked him how it felt I got his current favourite answer to everything of “I don’t know!”)

It is a great combination but I think I ended up going too far with the cornflour, as it ended up more like sand with the consistency of cloud dough rather than snow, not that there was a problem with that! He was loving it  and at this point it all got tipped out of the bath and onto the tuff spot and covering himself in it! I used a can of shaving foam and nearly a whole box of cornflour, whereas maybe if you stopped at half 0r 3/4 of a box it would be better.

This was also the point daddy came home and joined in the fun. We wanted to show daddy the fun with the shower foam too so we got out another can and sprayed some more foam.

Then we decided to add some liquid food colouring – we tend to use the gel stuff for baking these days so it was really going to waste otherwise.

Then daddy was making Monkey giggle by dropping big lumps of foam from really high up and making it ‘splat!’ in the bowl. Lots of good fun.

So it didn’t exactly go quite to plan, but we really had a lot of fun – especially Monkey, though Daddy was happy he got to join in when he came home too 🙂