Look Mom, a Dancing Octopus!

Henry's dancing octopus joke is still hilarious every time we open up the play dough....to Henry anyway......

I may have gone on a bit of a discount school supplies bender with the tax money we set aside in the "homeschooling" section of our budget.  Art supplies are essential to Kindergarten work, right?  If you haven't poked around their site yet you definitely should.  I bought a bunch of washable tempera paint, liquid watercolors, new brushes and I may have gotten a little carried away with the new play dough tools.  They had these dough squishers and three different sets of rollers, hammers, and clay tools and they were all huge hits--with the squishers coming in first, closely followed by the wooden "knife."  We make a semi-weekly batch of play dough so it was well worth the investment!

You can tell David's taking his play dough very seriously by the look of concentration on his face with his glasses perched on the tip of his nose........

I also restocked their regular watercolors which we usually do sans Henry, because, well, it's Henry.....

 
Once David made about six mini paintings he declared that he was a "real artist" and then promptly asked if we could have the real paint now.  Awesome.

Then there's the weaving board we made the boys out of the mini pallet our air conditioner repair men left behind and some extra chicken wire from the garden.  It has nothing to do with discount school supplies but it is arsty so there you go.  It's not the prettiest thing we've ever built but it sure is fun :)

David does a nice job weaving with my scrap ribbons (which I have a lot of because I compulsively save ribbon) and Henry has become pretty adept at un-weaving.  He likes to take all of the ribbons out and drape them over the top of the structure to "decorate his house" before he crawls under, which is pretty cute even if it is destructive.....

....and even with all the new art supplies and creative outlets we still didn't manage to keep the tv off as much as I had hoped this week, although there were two full days mixed in there that were totally screen free.  I'm hoping if I can dial back the tv watching, I will see a corresponding dialing back of David's craziness as well.........here's hoping........