It is literally four degrees BELOW zero right now.  Below.  Zero.  Four.  Degrees.

I cannot figure out why we live here sometimes.  Chicago happens to be the coolest place in the summer and about the worst in the winter, well this particular winter.  I actually do not despise winter but I despise the cold when it runs your life.  It is too cold to be outside for fear of immediate frost bite so they cancelled school.  Again.  You know what that means?  More kids crafts because I cannot take anymore TV.  Dora can kindly see her way right out the d-d-d-door.

January and into February tend to be very slow in the Real Estate market so I try and enjoy all this time I have with my pals but we are slowly running out of things to do.  (On a side note, if anyone is looking for an awesome Real Estate broker, I am ready and I may even bring you your very own bag of homemade play-doh.)  I am currently play-doh’d and crayoned and 3:00 bathed out.  So today we did something new…..and fairly messy as a fair warning.  I guess the messiness factor all  depends on your kids.  I have one “neat as a pin” pal and one pal that resembles a human tornado of hair.

We made our puffy paint then “baked” our masterpieces in the microwave oven.  Pretty cool rainy day or below zero day project.

Start with 4 ziploc bags and put 1/4 cup flour in each bag along with 1 teaspoon baking powder.

 

Then add enough water until it gets to the consistency of pancake batter….maybe 1/4 cup?  I just eyeballed it.  Then throw a couple squirt of food coloring in there and give it to your pals to mix up.

 

Then snip a tiny corner off of each bag and let them go to town on some white paper.  I used a thicker paper than your standard printer paper and it worked very well.

 

Then put the paper in the microwave individually for about a minute and the stuff puffs up and turns fairly hard so the mess is gone once you get to this step. This was also a fun step to watch.  We scooted a couple chairs up to the microwave and watched it grow into our final masterpieces.

 

I bet you cannot guess whose is whose……the hairy tornado made the one that resembles a hairy tornado and my neat and precise little angel took about 15 minutes to make the other.

So there you have it….polar vortex puffy painting.  Now what next?  Do I dare break out the finger paints?  My problem is that the paints never stay contained to the “finger”.  They tend to be full body paints at Camp Gerbrecht.  Oh well, here goes nothing.  Finger, er body paints it is.