After a long string of beautiful days spent outdoors, today’s rain brought on a welcomed change – a day indoors filled with hide-and-seek, books, baking, and arts and crafts.  Gracen LOVES painting, so while she napped, I gathered a few materials in preparation for a messy paint-filled afternoon.

We started out by using straws. (Have I mentioned that this girl has a thing for straws?  Naturally, it was her first choice.)  I plopped a few little drops of paint on the paper and demonstrated moving the paint by blowing through the straw.  You should have seen her gorgeous little eyes light up!  Although she was able to do it, I would definitely try to have a much longer, larger straw next time as it took a lot of effort and aim to really be effective. (Do they still have those giant Slurpee straws at 7-11?  Because if so, they would be perfect!)  
Eventually, she moved to just dragging her straw through the paint, which gave a just as good (if not better) result.  As you can see, she was pretty thrilled with it all:

With our straw painting up on the drying rack, we moved on to using Q-tips.  I dropped little splots of paint on her paper, handed over the Q-tips, and let her go.  She set to work without a moment’s hesitation, and announced, “More!” as soon as each paint blob had been smeared.
Next, we tried sponges.  This one was especially fun because she ‘jumped’ her duck and rabbit-shaped sponges from one paint splot to the next, leaving a rainbow-coloured trail behind them.

After A LOT of jumping, we moved on to painting with a golf ball (marbles work well too!)  I trimmed our paper slightly so that it could fit into a deep baking pan, splattered some paint on top, and placed the ball inside.
With just a couple of instructions, Grae figured out just what to do.  She gently tilted the pan back and forth, running the ball through the paint splots.  The result was really cool – little multicoloured tracks all over the page.

With our paper fully covered in tracks, I decided to grab a pinecone (a rare case when having little bowls filled with collections of things stored in your kitchen is actually convenient) to use as a brush of sorts.  Since we were nearing the end of our painting afternoon and we’d already used a lot of the paint, I handed over the entire tray and let Gracen go to town.  She dipped and stamped and dipped and drug her pinecone until there wasn’t much left of it. 
Haha!  I know that this would be some parents’ worst nightmare, but I’m a fan of getting messy once and a while.  Plus, what are you going to do?  Let all that leftover paint go to waste?!  With the go ahead from Mama, Gracen cautiously tipped the tray of paint over onto the brown packaging paper we were using to protect the table. 

No painting afternoon is complete without finger painting, is it?
And here are the finished masterpieces:

I’d say it was a successful rainy afternoon. ☺