Moon sand!

Yesterday I made "Cloud Dough" or "Moon Sand" for Katie, and it was a resounding success. She prefers to call it "Moon Sand," probably because she can pronounce both "moon" and "sand" and because she knows what those two words mean. She knows what "cloud" means but I'm not sure about "dough." Anyway - she loved it.

It wasn't nearly as messy as I'd feared it would be. One of the two ingredients is oil, so I thought it might stain our flagstone patio. But it didn't - I swept the spillage into the garden and that was that. I was surprised how little did spill, actually. Must have been my repeated requests to keep the sand inside the sand table!

The recipe called for 8 parts flour and 1 part baby oil, but I read online that baby oil is actually toxic. It can be fatal if aspirated, although I don't really think that's a possibility with Moon Sand. But it can also make you sick if ingested, and that totally is a possibility with, well, everything a 2 year old plays with. So I went with canola oil instead. It doesn't smell nice like baby oil, but otherwise it's quite similar. The finished product feels smooth like fine sand but sticks together if you squeeze it. Katie had a blast doing just that. I also had bought her some neat little sand molds from the awesome school supply store I just found. I almost went crazy in there but managed to limit myself to the sand molds and some wooden beads for stringing. :)

Anyway, here's Katie, enjoying her Moon Sand! I put it in an old plastic storage container for which we've lost the lid. Apparently we stole it from my mother-in-law, as it has a label with her name and address on it. Whoopsie! And don't you love the stylish duct-tape-and-cardboard-box pedestal on which it sits? Seriously, I must secretly be a redneck.

Whee!

She'd lost interest after a while, until I tried to clean up the moon sand. Then suddenly it was fascinating again!