KOOL-AID PLAY DOUGH RECIPE

Wow. What a completely terrible day. St. Patrick's Day 2014 was a complete bust, with the exception of our new play dough recipe. Everything else, not cool. 

We started the day with a torturous photo shoot. I don't know why I insist on continuing this tradition. Holiday photo shoots were great last year when I could just lay my sweet tiny baby on a blanket and she would just stay in one spot and coo and smile. This year, I have to wrestle my crazy toddler into festive clothes, put her someplace where she can't possibly get hurt or break something and then fake sneeze 42 times in order to get a semi-smile, all the while snapping 100 pics a minute, hoping when I look at them later there will be at least one that isn't a complete blur because she doesn't stop wiggling for even one second. I managed to get one today that wasn't completely blurry, and we turned it into a Facebook and Twitter message:

Speaking of Twitter, I'm trying it out. I feel like I need a mentor on that crazy network. I find myself googling everything that happens, like "What's a retweet?" and "What does 'promoted' mean?" It's a whole new world. I followed a few of my favorite celebrities, because it forced me to, and most are no longer my favorites. How do people have time to tweet every thought that enters their minds? And why do they want to? And, even more importantly, why would anyone want to read all of them? I have a feeling it's going to be a big fail for me.

Back to the terrible, horrible, no good, very bad St. Paddy's Day. I stuck my finger in my poor K's mouth on Sunday to see why she was drooling so much and also chewing on everything from hair bows to Little People, and found not one, not two, but THREE molars making their way through her tender gums. That not only explained the puppy-like chewing of everything in sight and the gallons of saliva pouring out of her mouth, but also explained the serious case of attitude she'd been rocking for the past few days. 

When I was checking on the status of those big mean teeth, I found that the extremely sharp tips had come through and her gums were really swollen. Poor little baby girl! Welp, there went all the plans I had for our day of Irish fun. 

She didn't want to color her leprechaun hat headband. She didn't want to dig around in green Jello. She didn't want to dance a jig all around the kitchen with her momma. The only things Kinley was interested in today were whining, getting snuggled, lime Kool-Aid play dough, splashing in the germy food water in the dishwasher door while I loaded it, and putting everything she could get her mitts on in the garbage (unfortunately, nothing gets in the way of this girl's love of throwing stuff away.) Oh, and did I mention whining?

Now that would be enough to make this St. Pat's a bust, right? Well, there's more. Dave and I have been excited about corned beef and cabbage for a week. We got all the stuff for it at Meijer yesterday and I put everything in the crockpot as soon as Kin and I got up today and set the timer for 8 hours--an hour longer than the recipe calls for, because we had a piece of meat a pound larger than recommended. With an hour left, I rushed around and cooked Kinley a different dinner (fish sticks, peas, green jello, rice pilaf and a smoothie) because she's been super picky lately and I didn't want to clean her portion of our Irish dream feast off the floor. 

So, I plated up K's food and called Dave in to cut the meat. He informed me as soon as he cut into it that it was not even close to being done. And the carrots were still crunchy. After eight hours. Apparently our super old crockpot had kicked the bucket. Perfect timing.

I sat down with Kinley so she would at least have some company while she ate dinner and tried to decide whether I felt more like crying or shot-putting the crockpot into the neighbor's yard. She happily munched on her fish sticks, ate two bites of pilaf and launched her plate, quickly followed by her smoothie, off of her tray. Wow. This day totally did not sham-rock. It didn't even sham-meh. 

My sweet husband ordered me off to take a hot shower while he cleaned up our Goo and the dishes and put our dinner in a pot on the stove to actually cook. What a day. At least we have Kool-Aid play dough, and that play dough just happens to be awesome.

I love the Jello play dough I previously posted about so much, but it calls for the super expensive Cream of Tartar, which unless you make meringue a lot, you probably don't have on hand. I pinned the recipe for this Kool-Aid play dough a couple of weeks ago from rockabyebutterfly.blogspot.com and I'm so glad I did. It doesn't call for Cream of Tartar and feels just as smooth and is a lot less work than the Jello kind.

KOOL-AID PLAY DOUGH

Ingredients

• 2 1/2 cups of flour
• 3 Tbsp vegetable oil
• 3 packets of Kool-Aid
• 1/2 cup salt
• 2 cups boiling water
• Glitter (totally optional, but we added it because we definitely needed some happy sprinkles today)

Put the water on the stove to boil, and while you are waiting for that to happen, just dump the flour, oil, Kool-Aid, and salt into a big mixing bowl and stir them up.

When the water boils, pour it on top of the flour mixture and stir until it's all combined.

When it's cool enough to touch, pull it out of the bowl and plop it on the counter. Knead it until it's a nice even consistency--couple of minutes tops. Now is the time to sprinkle on your glitter, too, if you want to. TA-DA!

This was the only thing that made Kinley super happy today. Well this and her Popsicles and teething rings. She played with this dough longer than she's ever played with play dough before. 

She carried it around, she tried out her dough tools on it, she smelled it (it smells awesome, by the way), she pushed it around in her shopping cart, and she even sat on it.

Huge hit. This dough's super smooth and the vegetable oil helps to cancel out the salt's tendency to suck all the moisture out of your hands. I will definitely make it again--think of all the pretty color and yummy smell possibilities. Lemonade for Easter. Orange and grape for Halloween. Sharkleberry Finn and Berry Blue for the 4th of July. 

Yep, I think this is my new favorite, sorry Jello.

The original recipe also said that this dough stores really well if you put it in a plastic bag in the fridge.

So even though our day was a bust, at least we found a new recipe to share with ya and had a good time together for an hour or so. Hopefully, my poor sweet baby's teeth rocket through her gums tonight while she's dreaming sweet Tylenol/teething tablet induced dreams and she wakes up tomorrow back to her old fun, happy, kooky self. And if she doesn't, at least we don't have to start our day with a photo shoot.

Oh, I almost forgot to tell you, our dinner was finally cooked at 11:30. I was still too mad and just ate toast on principle, but at least it will make great sandwiches tomorrow.

Thanks for letting me vent. 

Here's hoping your day shamROCKed way harder than ours did!