Various toddler books and websites promote the idea of pasta exploration as a sensory game, but I’ve hesitated to do any pasta activities with Travis ever since one attempt in January (18 months old), when he put a dry pasta shape in his mouth and then looked at me in horror. I was flabbergasted, as he has never been a mouther, and this confused attempt to eat pasta was literally the only time in his life I worried about him gnawing on something inedible.

So at 22 months, I decided to give dry pasta another go, with various goals in mind.

The first was simply for the sensory experience, providing him with a large basin and scoop. He quickly lost interest (a little too old now, I think), and decided it would be more fun to throw the pasta.

Here’s one of those moments to keep your parenting cool! I turned his curiosity into a lesson on dynamics, telling him pasta could be loud or quiet, and we wanted our pasta to be quiet i.e. gently placed back in the container. When he got a little too toddler-y on me (those pasta shapes were just so intriguing skittering and breaking across the kitchen floor…) I moved the game to the rug.

My second goal was to have Travis sort the pasta by shape, so I provided him with 3 types I thought were different enough: rigatoni, fusilli, and rather fun tennis rackets (racchettes).

Despite having learned his colors and shapes very early, Travis shows no interest in sorting, and ignored my attempts to encourage him to sort today, but I took the opportunity to discuss the differences between the shapes (curly versus straight, wide versus skinny), and I know he absorbed it on some level.

Once we moved to the rug, though, things got interesting. Travis became very concerned with clean up, and sang himself the Gymboree clean-up song while moving pasta pieces from the rug back to the box, which I’d left on the floor.  He enjoyed this version of the game for quite a while.

He then stumbled upon the discovery that one of the shapes I’d selected (rigatoni) could fit on his finger and voila! He started having the pieces talk to each other like puppets (acting out Don’t Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus, in fact). I was laughing hysterically, and joined in the fun.

Who knew? Rigatoni puppets. Sometimes it takes an almost-two-year-old to have the best idea.

Kids and Jell-O just seem to be a match made in heaven, and luckily I don’t need to deprive Travis of the fun just because original Jell-O isn’t vegan. A few brands without gelatin are now on the market, my favorite being Simply Delish Natural Jel Dessert.

I gave Travis Simply Delish’s Jell-O to play with when he was quite young, as a very early sensory experience. A few globs on his high chair tray provided much amusement for poking and squishing.

This week, at 22 months, we made our play a little more tool-oriented. Travis loved using cookie cutters in star and circle shapes to poke at the Jello-O, which he quickly identified as “wibbly wobbly!”

He was quite happy making shapes for some time, but very reluctant to poke at the stuff with his fingers. I did get him to try Jell-O “painting” by smearing some onto an elephant page from a coloring book he had started, but he quickly lost interest and went back to the cookie cutters.

The Toddler’s Busy Book recommends letting kids explore Jell-O with a different part of the body, too… feet that is! I added some to our tub just before bath time, thinking if he got all messy I could give him a quick rinse before a proper bath. He giggled at the “wibbly wobbly” in such an unexpected place, but try as I might, I could not entice him to put his foot in – even once I used my own as an example!

We finished the evening with Jell-O for dessert of course. Don’t worry: it was a different batch from the one that had all those hands and feet in it.