If I wanna fingerpaint, then I'm going to fingerpaint!

Yes, that's a line from South Park.  I watched it when I was in college.  I'm bad.  But I hardly watch any grown-up TV anymore so maybe it evens out.

Anyway, this week it has been raining constantly, which means we are stuck inside all the time.  Not that I'm complaining about the rain; we certainly needed it.  But it is mind-numbing to be stuck inside all day every day.  But I wanted to do a day at the park and a day of fingerpainting.  The forecast on weather.com misled me to believe that this afternoon it would not be raining and so I chose to do fingerpainting.  It was short-lived because as soon as we got out there and started painting, it started to rain.  But I did get a few fun pictures before it started.

I got this recipe for fingerpaints from someone else's website so I don't take credit for it, but I liked it because, other than food coloring, it was all stuff I already had in my kitchen, and it's all edible stuff so if you have a little one who likes to put stuff in his mouth whether he's supposed to or not, this is a good way to go.  Here it is:

1/2 c corn starch
3 tbs sugar
1/2 tsp salt
2 c cold water
food coloring

Basically throw everything but the food coloring into a pot and put it on the stove over low heat.  Mix it all up and stand there stirring it until it starts getting thick.  Then remove it from the heat and stir it all up.  Mine started to turn lumpy thick and I was afraid that I did something wrong but when I removed it from the heat and stirred some more, it all mixed together.  Then while it's still hot you separate it into smaller containers and add food coloring to each and stir it up to make whatever colors you want.  I just made the basic colors: green, yellow, red and blue, but I'm sure you could mix yellow and red to make orange and blue and red to make purple.  Also, I used a lot of red coloring because I was trying to get it as close to true red as I could.  If you use just a little red it will be pink, which could also be fun if your kid likes pink.  Mine doesn't care, I'm sure.

Here is the result.  You can store them in airtight containers and supposedly they will keep for three days.  I'm going to try to store them in the fridge to see if they'll last longer than that since I doubt we'll be back outside to do more fingerpainting in the next three days.

The forecast said it would be sunny until 5:00, which would have been fine since I have to come inside and start cooking dinner at 5:00 anyway, but Elijah took a long nap today and didn't get up until 3:30 and then, of course, he has to have snack to tide him over until dinner.  So we didn't really get outside until like 3:45.  This again would have been fine if the forecast hadn't lied to me.  ::give evil eye::  We only got to paint about 15 minutes before it started to rain.  But here is what we got:

Yes, that's one of Mike's old undershirts and a drop cloth I've used 100 times on the table.

Some of it goes in the hair, of course.

So there you have it.  Hopefully we can do it again at another time where it will be more fun and we don't get rained on.