Today we celebrated Father’s Day with both my darling fiance and my Dad. It wasn’t the most fabulous day, as we have a lot of flood damage which my father helped us with, and it brought a bit of a downer on things. But it was still good to spend time with both of them.

My mum and dad have been in town since Friday. They brought presents for my birthday in a few days’ time, and helped to do some really cool things to repair and tart up this house. My dad put in towel rails in the bathroom where there were none, he fixed some terribly dodgy electrical work (yes, he’s qualified!), put in a new clothesline, and dug a ditch through all our flooding, leaky sewerage (read: poop!) to make life a bit easier here for us.

Mum and Dad left before lunch today, but it was good to see them on Fathers Day. My fiance was given the usual privilege of doing less work around the house, having full tv remote rights and as much rest as his heart desired.

He’s such a beautiful Dad.

The adore him so much. He’s always there for a cuddle, a joke, a wrestle and a game. He cooks the best meals and he’s a fantastic role model. He’s a pretty awesome soul mate too! I know I’m so blessed to be spending the rest of my life with such a wonderful man. Happy Fathers Day darling, we all love you so, so much.

Are you ready for another of Momalom’s !!! aka Intentional Happiness posts? Good…

!!! for the brown jumper (sweater for our American readers) that Mr 4 has been insisting on living in. It must be making him happy to want to wear it so much.

!!! for the bond he and Daisy the dog have together. They love to wrestle. !!! For his natural, beautiful affinity with animals. For how confident he is with them. And no, the dog isn’t trying to eat him, it just looks that way.

!!! because this photo is too bleedin’ funny to me.

!!! for that beautiful, infectious, wicked smile on my son’s face.

!!! for a lovely moment of sibling togetherness.

!!! for the snuggles

!!! for all three of them, just for a perfect moment, getting along.

!!! for them all sitting still long enough for me to get a shot of them together in a photo.

!!! for Missy 2 having a rare daytime sleep. Extra !!! for those times like this when they just drop all of their own accord.

!!! for puppy snuggles and sooking.

!!! for utter cuteness.

!!! for playdough.

!!! for fun.

!!! for peace and quiet that playdough brings for long hours.

!!! for that playdough smell.

Missy 2 and Mr 4 had fun in the Spring weather making amazing chalk drawings. Missy 2 is obsessed with drawing, and she does it often. It’s good to let them experience different ways of doing things they love.

This activity held Mr 4′s attention for a long amount of time. His drawings are becoming more detailed, and he is putting more mental planning into his art as he gets older.

Drawing is an important part of childrens’ play. It gives them an opportunity to be creative. It’s a great fine motor activity, yet it’s also highly cognitive.

I added water to the chalk bucket to let the colours really ‘pop’. This is also a good thing to do if anyone involved has asthma, it can reduce the amount of chalk dust floating around somewhat. Although, as Missy 2 soon learnt, we still end up wearing the results of our work!

Daisy, our lovely puppy, insisted on being right in the thick of all the proceedings, of course. Once the children tired of drawing, they had a nice run with the dog. What a fun start to Spring.

Come play at the Childhood 101 We Play link up

I know in this current generation of parents, we all feel that we’ve come a long way in being able to talk closely with our children. But if we’re all truly honest with ourselves, sometimes we can unconsciously ‘block’ our child’s feelings when they are trying to express them to us. As I talk about reflective listening, you can find more ways to connect with your child when they are expressing their feelings with you.

Think about when your child is upset. How often have we all felt that it was our job to ‘fix’ it? If our children tell us they are dumb, we reassure them, ‘oh no, you’re very clever!’, or if a loved possession is broken, we rush in to put it back together. This is a positive thing, right?

Well, yes, but not always. Sometimes when we deny our child’s feelings of inadequacy by not acknowledging they feel ‘dumb’, for example, it removes the child’s option to express how they feel about that. As parents, we want our children to feel good about themselves and confident. It pains us to know that they feel in some way not good enough. So we do what we can to try to take it away.

It’s great to fix a broken toy, but do we sometimes bypass the child’s resentment of the child who broke it? Or their frustration that they weren’t able to stop themselves from dropping it?

Kids can pick up on our reactions to their feelings, and in time they may begin protecting us by not telling us if they are upset. It never hurts as parents to be aware of the need to let our children have their feelings and express them. Of course, it’s not acceptable for our children to hurt others or deliberately break things as an anger release, but there are other ways they can let that anger out. They could punch a pillow, stamp their feet, talk with or hug you.

Acknowledge your own feelings, and your child will benefit.

I’ve talked before about our reactions to our own feelings being taught to our children. If we can talk honestly about how we are feeling (without burdening a child with concepts beyond their capabilities), then they will learn that it’s perfectly acceptable to feel the whole gamut of emotions. The more switched on we are to our emotions, the more aware we can be of our child’s.

Talk about the past

I remember when I was 11, and starting to wear bras. My mum asked me if I saw any on a shop rack that I liked. I tried my luck, and pointed to a lacy, black one! Of course, my mum said no. Later down the track, when I was about 15 years old, my beloved Gram told me a story about how when she was a teen, all the girls at school wore black bloomers, but her mother forbade it.

She told me how desperately she and her sisters wished they could wear them too. Then, they moved to a school with a uniform with compulsory black bloomers! My Gram and her sisters were over the moon, and their mother, not amused, insisted that they wore white bloomers underneath to ensure that the black fabric did not touch their skin.

Although she was in her 80′s and I was in my teens, I felt a connection. This woman knew exactly what it was like to be a teen, to want to express herself, and experiencing the seemingly unfair rules that made her yearn for it even more. It made me feel close to her, and more able to tell her about my thoughts.

Listen and reflect

When your child is upset, angry or refusing to do something, listen. Hear what they are saying, then be a mirror and in your own words, reflect that feeling back at them. Your child will open up on a much deeper level than if you simply told them to cheer up. I’ll give you an example:

Today, Mr 4 had repeatedly hit Missy 2. I would hear her cries and see her clutching her face. Me, being pained to see my little girl suffer, wanted to ‘fix’ the problem, and tell my son to stop hitting her. But the reason behind the hitting wasn’t being addressed in this way. So he hit her again.

‘Stop hitting her!’ I scolded, and was met with an angry, defiant face. Then, I realised in trying to ‘fix’ things, I was blocking his emotion. So, I took a deep breath.

‘I can see you are angry at Missy 2′.

‘Yeah, she keeps touching my HAIR!! I don’t want her to touch it!’

‘And that’s annoying you, and now you’re mad,’ I replied.

‘Yes!’ he said. I told him I understood why that was making him angry. Now was the time to let him know that it’s fine to be angry about that, but he must not hit anyone because it hurts. I asked him to tell his sister in a calm voice about how angry he was about her touching his hair. (I resisted the urge to say that I couldn’t blame her, because his hair is beautiful! Don’t block, Sharon!)

He did. She said sorry and stopped touching his hair, and he stopped hitting her.

So, would you try this idea? I remember when I first read about it, it seemed very fake and unnatural. But the reverse is true. It’s such an easy way to open the door to your child’s feelings and resolve issues. It’s as simple as hearing your child telling you, either verbally or non-verbally how they are feeling, and then you saying back to them, how they feel. Let me know if these ideas work for you.

Missy 9 made this beautiful butterfly. Playdough appeals to all ages.

Home playdough is special. There’s no denying it. Sure, it’s fun for kids to play with the store-bought stuff, but there’s nothing like the smell of freshly cooked playdough to bring back fond childhood memories. When I smell it, I remember our old Playgroup hall and I can hear the noisy feet of my peers echoing on the floorboards. I hear table legs screeching as mums drag them away from the walls and set them up for us to play happily at.

What I love about making playdough yourself is that you get so much more to play with than what you’d buy in a lousy, plastic playdough can. It’s also great that it costs next to nothing to make. Playdough brings many benefits to the child, apart from being messy, good fun.

Playdough helps children to:

- strengthen and develop fine motor skills (use of hands)
- engage in creative play
- play dramatically, as they make up stories about what they’re making. It’s common to hear children making up pretend voices of their creations’ characters.
- develop their cognitive skills. Children use trial and error, cause and effect and basic experimentation to manipulate the dough into what they want it to do. They learn to problem solve.
- further develop their language. Children love to talk about what they are doing with their sculptures, and this in turn allows them to socialise with other children or adults.
- experiment with different tools and learn about how they work.
- watch how colours change when they are mixed together

How to cook playdough

You will need:

4 cups of water

4 tablespoons of cooking oil

4 cups of plain flour

8 tablespoons of cream of tartar powder

2 cups of salt

Dump all the ingredients into a large saucepan or frypan. I like this gigantic non stick electric frypan, because it’s less likely to spill over. Before you turn the heat on, mix it well.  It should look like this:

Turn the heat on to medium-low (my frypan heats up very rapidly, so I have to watch this. You don’t want it to burn or develop a crust along the bottom). It will start to thicken and look lumpy. This is normal.

Now, just stir constantly until it is a lovely, firm playdough consistency. Put it aside to cool before adding any goodies to it.

Once it’s cool, there’s so many things you can add to your playdough. Kool Aid can be used to colour it, or food colouring. You can even try beetroot or spinach juice if you and your kids are feeling experimental!

But don’t feel that you have to stop at colour. Sight is just one of our senses. Why not appeal to your child’s sense of touch, with some glitter shaken in, or some coloured rice? To colour the rice before adding it, shake some rice and food colouring together in a jar and spread it out to dry before adding it. It looks best if the playdough colour is a contrast to the colour of the rice.  Below is red and yellow food colouring added to rice.

It looks pretty, but children enjoy the granular sensation, and they notice a difference when flattening it with a rolling pin, or cutting it with a knife or a cookie cutter. This in turn often leads to much discussion! Why not throw some hundreds and thousands in for a mighty crunch? Then the children can watch the colours blend.

And what of our sense of smell? I’ve already mentioned how pleasurable the smell of playdough can be for a child (or adult. Ahem), so play around with that, if you will. You could make coffee playdough, mint scented playdough, just look around your kitchen and garden to see what you have.

The batch in the picture below has been mixed with Kool Aid and coffee, to encourage the children to experiment with different smells. We have cherry flavour, grape, tamarindo, lime, and raspberry. This cooked playdough recipe makes a large amount, so it’s excellent if you want a large variety of playdough types, or have a lot of kids using it either at home, playgroup or daycare.

Uncooked playdough

Sometimes, you might just want playdough quickly, and couldn’t be bothered cooking it, waiting for it to cool, yadda yadda, yadda… Or your kids might be keen to help you make it. Or, you might be at Playgroup and want to quickly make some for the kids, and not have time to cool it down before using it. My uncooked playdough recipe is handy for those times.

You will need:
3 cups of plain flour
1/3 cup of salt
1 and 1/4 cups of water
Plain flour for dusting
Colouring of your choice

Mix the first three ingredients together with your hands. Then turn it out onto a bench dusted with flour, and knead it until you are happy with its consistency. It should be just like bread dough.

Separate into the desired amount you’d like for each colour, then knead the food colouring through. Or you can use some of the suggestions mentioned in the cooked playdough recipe.

One thing that’s lovely about uncooked playdough, is that if children make it, they can give it to friends or family as  a nice little homemade gift. We kneaded a little glitter through part of the batch for a little extra sparkle.

Fun ways to play with it.

The ideas here are endless, but I’m going to give you some good ones to get you all fired up.

- using bare hands only.
- rolled into ‘sausages’ and children encouraged to cut it into pieces with scissors. This is an excellent way to familiarise children with scissor use and strengthen their little muscles in preparation. It’s also much easier to cut playdough with scissors than paper when a child is starting to learn.
- provide an old garlic press and let the kids watch the playdough squish out like spaghetti. Again, this is great for fine motor strength.
- raid your useful box for straws, lids, cupcake cases etc for your children to add to their play.
- give your children rolling pins and cookie cutters to play with. We’ve not unpacked our rolling pin since the move yet, so I improvised and gave the kids this empty tissue cylinder.

Make sure to store your playdough in some cling wrap or a sealed plastic container. It’s great to encourage the kids to help pack up, too!

Mr 4′s caterpillar. He became deeply engrossed in this activity.

Now, to make life a little bit easier for anyone who likes to make their own playdough or fingerpaint, not only can you find the recipes at Hear Mum Roar, you can also download them in a handy printable format to keep in the kitchen.  Click here to download.

I’d love to hear what your kids like to do with their playdough.

Edited to add: Here’s where Aussies can source Kool Aid (not sponsored links, just adding on request):

USA foods

This isn’t where I bought it from. I checked the place I bought it from last time, and they don’t sell it anymore:(