This easy pasta salad is perfect for lunch since it’s best served chilled. Use rotini or fusilli for a fun spiral shape.
Ingredients:
Mix up your toddler’s musical play with this silly D.I.Y. instrument. The buttons can be drumsticks, cymbals, or anything else your toddler imagines as you jam to favorite tunes.
To assemble, I used large two-hole buttons from the craft store and simply threaded one end of an elastic through each hole.
Now, the two loops of the elastic stick out from the back. Slip these loops over fingers, then turn pots and pans upside-down for some classic drumming.
Veronika didn’t actually like wearing the loops on her fingers, but she sure loved clanging the buttons against the pans.
She also liked putting the buttons in the pan, covering with the lid, and then shaking it to make noise.
For a slightly different version of buttons-on-pans, I hot-glued smaller buttons to the fingertips of an old garden glove.
Now she could slip this on and tap tap tap her fingers against the metal.
Consider this homemade instrument the next time you have a toddler sing-along over Zoom!
Here’s a toddler-friendly art project that’s perfect if you find yourself with a handful of colorful leaves after a fall walk!
To start, I mixed together a little white glue with different colors of tempera paint in small cups. Veronika chose yellow and green. I set these out, along with paintbrushes and two roughly equal squares of wax paper.
I showed Veronika how to dip her paintbrush in the glue mixture and then paint all over the wax paper.
The more glue the better, which means this is the perfect task for a toddler who wants to make a mess! Veronika loved that this activity was both goopy and colorful.
Once the wax paper is covered, help your child add colorful leaves to one of the squares. Cover with the remaining wax paper square. Trim the edges to the same size once the glue mixture dries.
It was hard to see the leaves when our wax paper was down on the floor, but once taped up against the window, the sun makes the leaves peek through. The perfect autumn window decoration!
joyful parenting 