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“Mom, I’m bored!”
How many times have we heard that lately?
Now that our kids are home all the time, isolated from their friends, they’re constantly looking for things to do — and we have to constantly reach into our bag of tricks to find something to keep them occupied. Eventually, even video games and TV get boring, which is when it’s time to send the little ones outside.
When my kids were little, they loved to take sidewalk chalk and use our driveway as their canvas to create some incredible art. But even that got dull after a while.
One mom, however, mixed things up and turned her kids’ old sidewalk chalk into outdoor puffy paint! She shared the details on her blog, The Best Ideas For Kids.
This squeezable “paint” (it’s really a mixture of liquid chalk) stays puffy thanks to a combination of ingredients most people already have at home. All you need are all-purpose flour, water, liquid dish soap and sidewalk chalk. If you don’t have full pieces of chalk, don’t worry! Just grab leftover pieces and you can use those to mix your paint.
The recipe outlines the quantities you need to fill one 16-ounce squeezable plastic bottle, which you can find on Amazon in packs of six for less than $15. Once you mix the base for the paint, all you need to do is add the powder from the pieces of sidewalk chalk!
If you want to make more than one color, just repeat the base-making process or simply increase the recipe by the number of bottles you want to make.
The recipe author recommends using the paint on the same day you make it because it can start to separate and go bad if it sits for longer than that. Also, while washable, the paint should not sit on concrete for too long, as it can be difficult to clean up.
Make sure to read the post fully for cleaning recommendations. But most of all, have fun!