Fairy Boats

It’s been a few days since I’ve been able to spend quality one-on-one time with my daughter, just the two of us.  Now that my little man is a big one year old he is into everything, all the time, and that means his big sister often misses out on mummy time.  Today he slept late and long, so we made the most of some girl time and made fairy boats.

Last week, while playing in the yard with a bucket of water my daughter discovered that some things could “float like a boat” and some things sank to the bottom.  She experimented with leaves, rocks, nuts and bark – testing each one to see what it did in the water.  When she discovered how perfectly the outer casings of macadamia nuts floated I promised we could make fairy boats out of them one day.

So today, we collected casings from under the tree, plus a few bits of bark and some boat-shaped leaves.  We tested all of the potential materials in a container of water, and discarded the sinkers!  Then we made boats out of the good ones.  We put a little ball of playdough into each one, stuck a toothpick into it for a mast and attached a paper sail with sticky tape.

We filled the bird bath up in the backyard, and our little fairy boats set sail!  The sun was shining, the breeze was blowing, and our little boats bobbed beautifully.  Well, until Little Miss 3 got too excited with her play and dunked a couple!!

It would have been lovely to let these boats go in a creek, but you’ve gotta work with what you’ve got, right?