I Tried to Be a Pinterest Parent and Set Up a Sensory Activity

If you’re a parent, you’ve probably been bombarded by those social media reels where a Pinterest parent sets up a fun sensory activity for their child.

I’m sure these reels are just designed to make you feel guilty. Do parents really do that stuff? Isn’t that what daycare is for?

My son’s attention span is getting longer, and although he will sit and play at an activity for a bit, I’m starting to find that after a couple of hours at home, he gets restless. When he gets restless, he bounces from one mischievous act to another, slowly driving me insane.

Yesterday, he woke up super early at 5 a.m., so by about 8 a.m., he’d started getting into mischief. I realised that as the responsible adult in the relationship, it’s my job to keep him entertained.

We had a morning outing planned, so in the afternoon I decided we would finally try this kinetic sand recipe I’ve been seeing everywhere.

After lunch, I put him down for a nap, and instead of setting up for this “sensory activity” (I swear we used to just call this messy play), I collapsed onto the lounge into a semi-coma. After about 90 minutes, I came to and decided to write a poem about how tired I was.

You can read it here.

Just as he was beginning to make waking-up noises, I decided to quickly run around and put everything together.

Of course, this also involved finishing the assembly of the table I’d bought last year, only to discover he was too short for it. By the time I’d finished putting the table together, he was making “I’m really awake now” noises, and I knew I couldn’t leave him in there much longer.

I quickly made my way to the kitchen to make the sand.

Then, the cat started meowing at me for her next meal.

I work terribly under pressure, so I was now trying to measure out flour to the sound of my son screaming on the baby monitor and the cat constantly meowing at me. I was becoming a frazzled mess, but I can at least confirm you don’t need to have accurate measurements for this recipe, as I was just throwing flour in by the end of it.

This is the recipe I sort of followed.

Kinetic Sand

Ingredients

• 4 C flour
• ½ C baby oil (this gives it a nice soapy flavour if you get it in your mouth).
• Optional, or should I say optimistic: a couple of drops of food colouring. There was no way I was doing this, as the activity would be messy enough without it.

Method

1. Throw the flour into a bowl and add the baby oil.
2. Mix it with a spoon.
3. Once it looks mixed in, knead it with your hands. The mixture should look like sand, but clump together like dough when you hold it in your hands.
4. Pour the mixture into a tray and add anything else you might like to include in the experience. I used some toy farm animals and old measuring cups we had lying around.

I put the tray outside; there was no way we were doing this in the house, and I ran to get him out of bed.

When we went outside, it took him a moment to realise the tray was there, but once he saw it, he quickly ran over and started playing. I enjoyed hearing his squeals of delight and watching him say, “Wow,” when I showed him you could build a tower with the sand.

He played happily for about 15 minutes, but then he started grabbing chunks of sand and throwing them on the ground. After asking him nicely not to throw it, and then saying “No” about 1000 times, I gave up and watched him throw about half of the mixture away. Our yard now has suspicious-looking white powder all over it.

I was able to salvage the rest and put it in a container. It can be stored and reused for a couple of weeks.

Although this activity was messy and took preparation, I enjoyed playing with the sand. It’s actually quite therapeutic. I also feel like a good parent for putting a little extra effort into our afternoon.

I'm going to call this a win since I made it from ingredients I already had around the house, and they're selling this sand for $5 a bucket at Kmart.