At home Easter Sunday activities

I've been surfing the Internet in the past few weeks for things to do with the family for Easter Sunday. Here in Singapore, Easter Sunday is quite a big celebration, with most hotels offering up buffets and having special activities for kids like Easter egg decorating, face painting, balloon sculpting and magic shows. However, the cost for such celebrations tends to be steep with the price ranging from SGD50 to 150 per head (buffet usually free or slightly cheaper for kids). The cheapest option I found was Easter Sunday High Tea at Pantry at the Stables which offers SGD40 for 2 adults and SGD22 for each child. This would cover High Tea as well as participation in the Easter Egg hunt, face painting and take-home goodie bags. However, as my hubby pointed out, my 2 year old daughter might not fully enjoy the Easter egg hunt. And so, I was tasked with thinking up at home Easter Sunday activities for our daughter instead.

So of course, I decided on face painting, easter egg decorating and a mini-easter egg hunt.

I'll post about the easter egg decorating and the mini-easter egg hunt after Easter Sunday, so for now, I'll just talk about our face painting efforts.

Now I'm no face painter but given that I've been helping my daughter with her art activities I'm thinking how hard can it be? So I went out to look for face paint supplies at children's toy stores. 

I was choosing between Snazaroo, Giotto and Micador face paints and eventually bought the Micador face paint set seen above. It was a basic set, quite affordable (SGD15.90) and easy to apply (no need to use sponges). 

At first, my daughter wouldn't let me draw on her face, but as my husband pointed out, she just needed to be curious about it and needed to see it being done on someone first.

Here's what I drew on hubby's face.

And though my daughter eventually relented and allowed me to paint on her face. She would stay still only long enough for this.

I'm excited about this. Will probably have to look for more face painting designs on the internet. But looking forward to face painting fun.

As for our easter egg decorating efforts and our mini-easter egg hunt, I already have the recipe for making easter eggs, now just have to decide whether to buy small chocolate eggs or big chocolate bunnies or just buy one big plastic egg (ala Swedish PASKAGG which is a big paper egg filled with chocolates and candies). Stay tuned.

Making play clay

The last time we went to our pediatrician, she recommended that we let our daughter play with clay so she could develop her fine motor skills. I was a bit hesitant to do this at first as she was still at that stage where she loved putting things in her mouth. Even now, she would draw and paint and we (me or the nanny) would have to sit with her to make sure she didn't start putting the marker tips to her mouth or start biting chalk. I felt it was a bit of a risk to buy any of the popular modelling clay brands for young kids. I mean, even Play Doh is recommended for kids 3 and up. But as it was something that would help her develop, I thought I'll just try to make sure to get something food grade level so even if she ingests it, I wouldn't worry.

Coincidentally, I was browsing through the latest issue of Parenting Early Years magazine on my zinio and read about ecokids usa which develops creative play toys using non toxic and food grade ingredients. Note the description...'exploratory molding dough handmade with natural and organic fruit, plant and vegetable extracts from annatto seed, beets, blueberries, carrots, paprika, purple sweet potato, red cabbage and spinach, flour, salt, cream of tartar, organic rosemary oil, vitamin E oil, soybean oil, coconut oil, potassium sorbate and citric acid.' Wow, it actually sounds good enough to eat. Aside from eco dough, they also have eco paints and eco crayons. I was all excited to buy when I saw the price USD23.99. Aaarrrghh. So expensive. You could buy the same amount of Play Doh (just the compound, no tools) for about USD5.

   

No choice but to do it the old-fashioned way then which is to make it homemade. I browsed the internet and found several recipes for homemade play clay. Here's the one we used today:

Play Clay

1 cup flour
3/8 cup salt
3/8 cup hot water
Food coloring (optional)

Mix flour and salt in a bowl. Pour water. Stir. Knead for 5 mins. Mix in food coloring if available. Play.
Once done, store in airtight container. Will last for a week.

Homemade play clay and Crayola = Fun

And yes, the moment we handed her the ball of play clay she immediately took a bite out of it, and it did take a bit of work to get her to play with it, 'No this is not food, this is for play', but eventually she got the hang of it and we'll probably be making more batches of this in the future, but with color next time.