17, 18, Finger Painting!

A few weeks ago I moseyed down the craft aisle at WalMart looking for some arts and crafts activities to do with K.  I saw finger paints and noticed there was no minimum age so I decide to pick them up.  I did a little internet research and found that as long as nontoxic paints were used, babies as young as one year could finger paint!  I was sure my seventeen-month-old would love them!

I debated on how I could do this and create the least amount of mess.  I considered the bathtub, but thought, if things went well, I would like to commemorate this first experience and have proof of it on paper.  So, I taped a few large coloring pages onto the kitchen table, and put K in his high chair.  Then I squirted a dollop of each color onto a plastic plate.

As the yellow blob on his lip indicates, the first thing he did was try to eat some yellow paint.  I told him it was yucky and not for eating.  He definitely agreed it was yucky and for a few moments didn't try to taste it again.  He began to realize that he could actually paint on the paper with this goo and was intrigued.

Unfortunately, things deteriorated pretty quickly from here.

  

As you can see in this last picture, some more paint made it's way into his mouth and he is pretty displeased with the taste of it.  There are no pictures after this point because I ran over the sink to get a wet rag to start wiping his mouth out.  While I was at the sink he started trying to wipe out his mouth with his hand - which was still covered in paint - and before I could get to him he had thrown up.  :-(

Now, I don't know if it was the paint or if he gagged himself or what, but it wasn't pretty.  It didn't seem to bother him at all, though.  He continued to paint, but I decided it was time to end our arts and crafts experience for the day.  I may wait a few months before attempting this again...

K got to enjoy a mid-morning bath after all of this, which he loved.  I don't have a picture of his bath that day, but I do have a super cute one of him in the bath from about a year ago that is probably one of my favorite pics of him...