Painting the Town. Literally.

Welcome to my version of life: my life well-loved. 

I'm pretty excited to be back in the blogosphere after a short hiatus since early May when I closed out my absolutely beloved blog, Lessons From Lifeskills, and took the leap across state lines to our new home and my life as a stay-at-home mom. As we've explored our new surroundings, nested in our new home sweet home and hosted our first set of visitors, many bloggy ideas have floated around in my head. After writing exclusively about my adventures as a special education teacher for the past few years, I'm excited to make the jump to my new personal blog. As my husband would tell you if you were to meet, I have a lot to say about pretty much everything. I gave narrowing down the topics for this blog a good faith effort before finally deciding to just call a spade a spade and write about whatever moments in my life strike me as blog-worthy (yes, foodie friends, there will be recipes!). 

And so it begins...

Oh, summer, we love you to pieces. We love the smell of suntan lotion, smiling, dirt-smudged faces, skinned knees (in my opinion, a sign of a childhood well lived and a life well-loved ;) ) and all of the little things that we crave during the long Midwestern winter. 

We started our day with the birds. My little ladies who, from here on out, will be collectively referred to as "my ladyfriends" and individually as Sweet Thing and the Catfish (more on that later), began their day with a litany of questions. By 8:30 am we had made marshmallows (coming soon!) made a Target run for Starbucks under the guise of buying hair detangler and laughed wildly at the toilet display in our local Sam's Club while discussing everything from how mold grows to pirate attire and prosthetic limbs. At this point, we decided an outdoor craft was in order.   

Our new house has a driveway that BEGS to be painted by little brushes. We are big fans of homemade paint, and I may or may not have hoarded multiple containers of cornstarch (more on that later too!), so the timing was perfect. 

In case you want to make some paint, here's how you do it:

Equal parts water and cornstarch (I usually do 1/2 cup per)

Food coloring (my mind was pleasantly blown when I found neon colors at Meijer!)

It's a crazy complicated process. Get ready...

  Mix and stir. Stir and mix. Wipe up spills. Easy peasy.

You have to work a little to dissolve the cornstarch, but look how pretty the process is!

 The girls had a blast making the paint, although there may have been a little drama over who mixed what color. 

Oh, the rough lives my ladyfriends lead. 

 We grabbed some brushes from our ever-growing brush stash...

 Then headed out into the summer sun for some crazy painting.

Here are my sweet girls. They are the best of friends and first in line to pinch, scratch or whack each other at a moment's notice. 

 It's hard to see the color in this picture, but the paint ends up drying like chalk and washes away easily in the rain. It's a bit of a sore subject with my sweet husband; however, since he had to endure my trial and error paint-making adventure during which I let the girls paint with a non-water soluble blue paint after we'd lived in the house for mere days...Eh, bygones.

 Here is the final product, aptly titled "Firework Explosion" by Sweet Thing. She takes her art very seriously. 

Then proceeds to drive over it in a tiny Jeep with her sister in hot pursuit.

 It was a morning well-spent. 

 Thanks for coming along on our adventure! 

 Do you have any favorite outdoor crafts to share?

I love, love, love comments so please leave me a message if you've stopped by the blog!

See you soon!