We’ve established my love/hate relationship with the pin-filled social time suck, right? I hate the standards it sets in my head for how my life is supposed to look and operate, but I still find myself losing hours each week scouring the site for a pinned image of my perfect mantle…or the best dinner ever, or a DIY project that will save us thousands of dollars. How often does one of these things happen? That’s beside the point. I can, at least, pretend to plan to be productive.

When it comes to my kids, Pinterest has come in handy to cure the inevitable boredom that they’ll experience with a working from home mom. Most of the time, these projects fail miserably in the fact that they create more work for me when I have to dismantle whatever disaster it’s caused. Here’s our top three (so far):

1. Bath tub paint
We tried out the bath tub paint Pinterest recipe on a rainy day when I wanted to punch Muno in the face if he sang another high pitched song about biting his friends (If you don’t know who that is, you are a lucky SOB). I had managed to twice keep HJ from rubbing finger paint on my white kitchen walls and B was FINALLY asleep for one hour of silence. So I pulled out this genius idea and mixed up a batch of blue and a batch of yellow. I took the already naked toddler (don’t ask) to the tub. Things were going well and I felt like Mom of the Year when the bowl of blue goo fell into the tub. It immediately turned the water into something you see at an outdated water ride at World’s of Fun (if you’ve been there, you know how scary that S is). HJ, of course, lost it. You’d have thought the water turned to boiling lava and she jumped out and into my arms in .3 seconds. In the process, my bathroom floor, rug, wall, pants and shirt were blue. It came only kind of clean.

2. Beans sensory activity
I guess some people have those kind of children who color inside the lines and keep paint on the paper during craft time. I don’t know because I’ve yet to meet such people. I guessing that these people were also the ones who came up with the bean sensory activity. One day, I found that I had a random bag of beans in my pantry and thought “What the hell?”. So I set up this magical sensory play activity complete with bowls, measuring cups and spoons. Ha. That was one of the worst ideas ever. Within five seconds of setting down the tub of beans, HJ skipped right over all of the utensils I got out and instead dumped the entire thing on my kitchen floor. She then jumped in the bean pile and frantically swiped her hands around to see how far she could scatter them. Super duper. That was a month ago and I’m STILL finding those stupid beans hiding in various crevices of our house.

http://wellcommons.com/users/photos/2013/oct/09/262864/

3. Kool-Aid Playdough
You know what’s NOT a good idea? Giving a child who already eats regular playdough new playdough that smells like something delicious. We did the Kool-Aid Playdough activity with our Parents as Teachers educator (which is a fantastic program if you’ve never heard of it). I was excited because I had wanted to try this recipe because duh, it has Kool-Aid in it. Our PAT educator even brought the mystery Kool-Aid packet where you don’t know what color you’re going to get until water hits it. Pure awesome. You know what wasn’t awesome? The fact that half of that playdough is now gone because it smelled so good that HJ made it her lunch the next day. Thank goodness it’s non-toxic.

Now that it’s getting cold outside, I’m sure this list will continue to grow. I’ll be sure to dazzle you with the results over on the Larryville Mom Facebook and Twitter.