A Review - Munchkin Star Fountain Bath Toy

We opened one of Lexie's 1st birthday presents as a pre-birthday gift for bath time this morning.  It's the Star Founain by Munchkin.  It's a bath toy.  It comes in pink and blue, but when we bought it, only the pink version was available at our Wal-Mart.  I think we paid around $8 for it.  It takes batteries and has an on switch.  Once it's on, it somhow sucks water from the bath tub in and sprays it out like a fountain.  Lexie was not scared of it, but also wasn't too sure about it, as she isn't quite able to escape the water, yet, so she gets sprayed in the face.  Olivia, who is over 3 years old, loved the toy.  I think it's pretty cool so far, but I'll keep you updated!

Yummy Dough Cookies & Review

Package Contents (missing the little modeling tool) & what the dough should look like.

The adding of water & mixing of dough mixure.

Some time before Christmas, I bought this 3-pack of Yummy Dough at Costco because it looked really fun. I think it only ended up being about $3 a box or so. Yummy Dough caught my eye because of what it says on the box: "Shape it, Bake it, Eat it - Edible Modelling Dough!". I mean really, what sounds more fun than that to a little one? The dough is edible not only when it's baked but also when it's raw. It's also nice to know that Yummy Dough is constantly quality tested and that its colouring agents are all vegetable, per Wikipedia. Anyway, I finally got around to trying it today and it was pretty awesome!

Some pictures of how our lion came to be.

You can find step-by-step instructions on the

Yummy Dough Website for many creations.

I wasn't sure if Yummy Dough is available anywhere else other than seasonally at Costco, but I googled around a bit and found it online here at Chapters.ca. I'm not sure if they also carry it in store.

The tasty Yummy Dough Lion

I was totally excited to find out that this dough (originally called Essknete, which is German and literally translates to Eatable Dough) was actually invented in Germany in 2005 by a man, who credits his two daughters to have given him the idea, as they wanted to not only be able to play with dough, but be able to eat it at the same time. I think it's neat that Yummy Dough's website is in German, English and Polish.

The cupcake was a favourite of my daugther's - she's got a sweet tooth - what can I say?!

All the items you need in order to make your fun pieces with the modelling dough, are included in the Yummy Dough Box. There are four packages of dough mixture: green, blue, yellow & green, a syringe (which is used to ad 20ml of water to each mixture) and a modeling tool. It took me about 30 minutes to knead all the doughs to the right consistency and then the fun began. I logged onto the Yummy Doug website and followed some of the step-by-step instructions in order to make little masterpieces. This is especially great for people like me, who are not very artsy. The Yummy Dough website also has instructions that you can print off, put under the parchment paper and by tracing, create your shapes that way.

Strawberry - Flower - Mushrooms (ran out of red, so these are Super Mario ones) - Butterfly

I made these cookies with my 3 year old daughter and she helped by pouring the dough mixtures into the bowl, syringing the water and then stirring it. She had fun. Other than that, she mostly played with one of the balls of dough that I was not using, creating her own creations with lots of imagination. However, she very much enjoyed herself.

What I really love about Yummy Dough is that it's:

entertaining

educational

easy to use

affordable

yummie

unique

fun

All our cookies before they went into the oven.

The final product - my daughters favourites were the ice cream cone, cupcake & lion.

Linking up with: Skip to my Lou

Melissa & Doug Food Groups - Review

This picture is from Melissa & Doug

I think out of all the play food that my daughter (age 3) has, this is her favourite. She plays with it every single day. Her favourite thing, is to put all of the items in seperate bags or cans or whatever she can find to put the items in and carry them around. Then she re-bags the items and can play like this for 30-40 minutes or so. She also uses the Melissa & Doug Food Groups with her KidKraft Kitchen. She doesn't really sort the food group items yet or anything like that, but here are the reasons why I really like Food Groups by Melissa & Doug.

*It's wooden

*It's affordable (~$20)

*Includes 22 food items

*Includes all food groups

*Nice colours

*Comes in 4 baskets, so food items can be sorted into different food groups & stored easily

*Encourages healthy food choices

*Encourages imaginative play

We got it for our little girl around 34 months and she's loved it ever since. The Manufacturer's recommended Age is 3+. Do you have this toy also? What do you think of it?