Muddy Day Play

Oh MUD day!  How much fun are you?! 

Except for little girls who hate to get dirty.
But that's okay when you pair mud with bath time.
 So here in Texas, someone forgot to tell October that it was Autumn, and the temps have been in the 90's and super humid.  Awful.
Finally last Friday, October got the message, and we were blessed with some of the most beautiful weather! So naturally we took our Down on the Farm:
Mother Goose Time Mud Day outdoors.

I whipped out our water table, shovel, and hose and took some dirt from our barren vegetable garden, and put it on one side, while adding bubbles to our water to make a nice bath for our dirty farm animals.

Sweet Pea loves these Fisher-Price Little People Animal Friends Farm that we added to the mud.

She didn't even touch the dirt... but she made the pig a nice mud puddle.  I had to move all her animals when it came to bath time which she really enjoyed giving them.

After our play time outdoors, we came into the house so I could prepare lunch and she could do our next Mother Goose Time activity.... Make and Create Mud Pies!

Mother Goose Time included this awesome homemade play dough recipe that could be used as the dirt for our mud pies!  It called for chocolate pudding mix, which I didn't have on hand, so I used a 1/4 cup of cocoa powder and it worked perfectly!

This is not an edible recipe.  It will taste gross, but it's a great recipe for playdough.

1/4 cup of cocoa powder or 1 box of chocolate pudding mix

1 cup of baking soda (get the gigantic box in the laundry aisle if you are planning to do more DIY)

1/4 cup of water

3 Tbsp of veg oil

Mix it all together and this is what you get:

Once the play dough was made, I set out her tray with the Make and Play Mud Pie picture, rocks, tin foil pie plate, (all of which were included in our kit), along with some of our own jewels, buttons and shells to imprint designs into the "mud."

This is the kind of mud Sweet Pea is into.  

Sweet Pea kept coming up to me while I was making lunch and telling me to sit in the purple chair at her table and create with her.  How could I resist?  

I took a few little jabs at her new play dough and helped her press it into the foil pan before I had to go back into the kitchen.

She had so much fun creating her pie, and for a neat-nick kid like herself, I was so pleased that Mother Goose Time included a way for her to have fun without getting dirty on Mud day! 

Want to see some other great activities Mother Goose Time has for Mud Day? Check out these posts:

Muddy Letter Learning

Watching a Child Create: Muddy Pig

This post has been linked to The Gathering Place...a great site for all things toddler related :)