19 Things Pinterest Has Taught Me About Mothering Small Children

What Pinterest has taught me so far about arts & crafts with small children:

1. You have to buy the neon colors of food coloring. You will get very bored with red, blue, green and yellow, and everyone else has the neon ones.
2. You are going to use a lot of food coloring.
3. You are going to be very familiar with the color that results from blending all of the food colorings. This color should be called “dinosaur skin.”
4. There are 349 recipes for homemade play dough, and counting.
5. Making homemade play dough means grabbing any two common household ingredients, mixing them together, and saying “See! I bet a little kid would think this sludge is awesome!”
6. Next, add food coloring.
7. Next, add glitter.
8. Next, add things like Kool-Aid and spices. This makes the play dough smell incredibly yummy, so good luck trying to teach any youngsters NOT to eat it.
9. In fact, everything is supposed to smell yummy, including paint, dried rice, and slime. So just keep adding Kool-Aid.
10. Your vocabulary will include words like “oobleck,” “cloud dough,” “quiet book,” “sensory bin.”
11. You should probably get a sensory bin.
12. Other euphemisms for sludge, besides play dough, include sand, snow, clay, foam, floam, magic mud, rainbow slush, etc.
13. Use the baking soda + vinegar combination all the time, in everything. Most of your dough, sand, snow, clay etc. will include baking soda anyway. So when your kids get bored, start squirting on vinegar. Now you can add the words “fizzing!” "erupting!" "exploding" in front of dough, sand, snow, clay, etc.
14. Buy a 13-pound bag of baking soda from Sam’s Club, and vinegar by the gallon.
15. Fortunately, the spills that happen during art and sensory play are already made out of the things you would normally use to clean up spills.
16. I can’t believe you BOUGHT that thing from Crayola. Didn’t you see the DIY version using just baking soda and food coloring?
17. You will enjoy the art and sensory activities every bit as much as your kids. Or more. In fact, you might still be sitting on the kitchen floor squishing sludge through your fingers after your kids have wandered away.
18. You will feel out of the loop for a long time while the mommy bloggers keep referencing trending arts & crafts projects with phrases like “you’ve probably seen melting crayon art everywhere,” and “there are a million versions of sharpie tie dye on Pinterest.”
19. You will reach a proud moment where you start to feel in the loop. Yeah, I totally have seen melting crayon art everywhere.