Saturday morning at home

As weekends are the only real time that i get with the girls, I try to make it couont and do stuff that we usually wouldnt do on weekdays. Saturday mornings are especially important - Saturday afternoon, we whisk the girls off for piano and shopping, and shloka class and swimming and before you know it, the day is done. Sunday there is often the walk or IEP and only half a day of play is there. Often much of it is spent sleeping or in logistics. Here are a few snippets from last Saturday. Pancakes are the typical Saturday morning breakfast and the girls help me to mix, add, measure and cook atleast a few pancakes. Husband often complains that I make too little -the batch I make often had about 6-7 pancakes. Last Valentine's day, I made a slightly different from normal pancake by using this heart mold, shaped from Aluminium foil. I was quite surprised as to how nicely it came out. Anjali suggested we do it again this time, and here are the pictures

Painting with nailpolish. It was Anjali's idea to paint this toy dressing table with Nailpolish. Look at all that concentration

Side walk chalk art. This picture was taken after the girls had done the art and were somewhat in the process of cleaning it up. They figured out, during the last time we took the sidewalk chalk down to the playground, that adding water to the chalk makes for far more vibrant colors. And they are at it a lot these days. Let me tell you that the floor of the house if perpetually always wet and the girls spend more time on Saturday morning in the bathroom than anywhere else in the house.

About the bathroom thing, husband asked the girls why we needed to go to the swimming pool when all the girls did was to stay in the bathroom. Anjali's response was "There is no drain in the swimming pool" And here was a hit activity. I gave the girls free rein over the scrap fabric bag that I am using for the floor rug, along with a wire rack from the oven. Anjali is very much into knotting and she immediately jumped in to knot the fabrics. I am wondering if I should invest in some nice ribbon or raffia for these purposes instead of clipping the sash fabrics from old dresses. At some point Sophia jumped in to do knotting as well, but Sophia cant knot, so she has been doing a lot of weaving. The activity was a lot more successful than the loom that I made with a cereal box, which the kids lost interest after a couple of weaves. I guess that a tailored activity has only a bit of scope - you can only weave and it uses only one skill, whereas, an activity like this you can do many things, knot, weave, pretend that the fabric is the ocean, sharks, snakes, boats, islands etc, as is what happened during the activity.

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For the record and in my ongoing defence of handmade home made toys, Sohia had received a small embossing kit for her birthday which I took out to keep her occupied while Anjali was doing the knotting - I didnt anticipate Sophia to do knotting. But it turned out that after a couple of punches with the embossing kit, both girls left it to play with scrap fabric. I also noticed that the major attraction of the embossing kit was that it was shiny and plasticy and new, while my wire rack has the dirt of centuries on it. But to be fair to the kit, it is intended to be part of a larger activity - probably, emboss your greeting cards while painting them, or something like that, and it would probably have success as part of color, cut and paste evening

This is the final product. Isnt it pretty? These were combined with a good dose of unphotographed activity - we baked raisin oatmeal cookies, and the girls licked the batter pot. We drew a copious amount of the floor with temporary markers, We did some improvements to our cardboard doll house and moved Dora and Maestera Beatriz indoors... The girls are also helping me to prepare for the STYYC contest and gave me suggestions about their crowns etc. But more on that in due time. Anjali has a favorite activity these days, even more favorite than the sidewalk chalk mess and it is this

While it is very helpful to do this after a nice round of painting where the floor is splattered with color, I lost my head at her when she put her nightgown on the bathroom floor and mopped all over it.