Some art to pass the time

This past weekend Paul worked a little bit and I felt the need to shake Maria out of her whiny, late summer, I miss my friends, there's nothing to do at home moping so I went to www.familyfun.com. I found a couple of art projects that were easy and ran me out of salt. For the first one draw a picture with glue and then sprinkle it with salt. Shake off the excess salt and then drop drops of water colored with food coloring onto the salt lines. The water races along the lines of salt and where two colors meet they mix. I don't advise this as an indoor project, Maria is very neat and there was salt everywhere!

For the next project we mixed equal parts salt, water and flour and colored it with food coloring then put it into ziploc bags. Cut the corners off the bags and squeeze it into designs.

Stella is a walking fool, it's all she wants to do these days, hang onto your fingers and walk. Sometimes she'll let go of your fingers for a moment and stand by herself and I think she could pull herself up to standing if she tried but she thinks someone needs to be there to help her. Maria is ready to help her and likes to help her stand up at her little table that plays music and has lots of buttons to press-that makes me a little nervous. Stella is also communicating a lot. She signs "more" all the time and has signed "all done" and we think she signed "milk" a couple of times and "eat" once. She at least made correct-ish hand motions at the appropriate times. She says "ga-ga" for gato and "Mama" and "Papa" and I think she impersonates the intonations that you make when saying words. She makes the wrong letter sounds with the correct intonation. Today she copied the cat-it's true I swear.