The Girl is now reeling from the same uber slimy cold The Boy had over the weekend so yesterday tempers were a little frayed chez LO. I decided a wee bit of sensory play was in order to try and distract small people from their screaming abdabs without recourse to the digital babysitter. It worked better than I hoped. The Girl was plonked in her high chair with a large wedge of orange and I gave The Boy a tray of coloured chickpeas to play with.
I got the rainbow chickpea idea from the ‘And next comes L’ blog. I had a bagful of dried chickpeas in my cupboard (god knows how long they’d been there. I think they’ve moved house at least three times – I long ago worked out it’s actually cheaper to buy tinned ones, once you factor in the time and expense of soaking and boiling the bloody dried ones but I digress) and some fab gel food colours so I could make at least three different colours from the quantity I had.
I put about 2 or 3 tbsp of water into a bowl, added a good glob of food colouring and poured in a third of a 500g bag of chickpeas. Very little happened. Swallowing down my disappointment I stirred them a few times, they went vaguely pinkish but it was nothing like the vibrant colours I’d seen on the other blog – but then the magic happened! Bright red peas!
I repeated the process to do purple and green – each time nothing seemed to happened until bang! it did. Astonishing and fun. I let them dry, which didn’t take long, then turned The Boy loose on them.
He did a bit of pouring. We discussed ‘less’ and ‘more’. Then he looked at me sideways and said, in a quiet voice, that the game was a bit boring. I’m not sure if he was expecting directed play or what, but I quickly told him he could do anything he liked, yes, even mix up the colours – well, then some fun was had. 
Watching him stirring and shaking I soon realised I needed a deeper container unless I wanted to spend the next week treading on unexpected chickpeas so I got a drawer from a plastic unit.
The Girl looked on as she sucked nearly a whole orange dry – BLW is going well. It was so nice to find something peaceful and vaguely educational for them to do before The Boy demanded bloody CBeebies back on! Hurrah for preschool today.
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