Olympic Medals

Do your kids ever have these brilliantly simple ideas that make you stop and say,"Why didn't I think of that?!"

More and more that's happening to me.

Let me back up for a minute.  I LOVE the Olympics. That being said, I think I've seen a total of about 30 minutes of them this summer.  I'm in awe of the swimmers, can't get enough of world-class soccer, and I'm envious of those beach volleyball players.  Not to start any controversy, but I just don't understand gymnastics.  Subjective scoring just doesn't sit well with me.

Anyway, there are all sorts of cool Olympics-related things to do with the kids out there on blogland, and I wanted a little piece of the action.  Since we enjoy accessorizing around here, I thought we could make our own gold (and silver, pink, black, blue, and sludge) medals.  After all, we have our own Michael Phelps- and Dara Torres-in-training. 

Anyway, we followed this tutorial to make some medals out of salt dough. 

We mixed up some dough and dumped a whole bunch of gold glitter in it.  Those little hands sure had fun squishing it all together.

Then we cut out all sorts of shapes using any cookie cutters we could find.  Of course the biscuit cutter grew legs and ran off, taking with it any normal shapes, so we were left with bees, hearts, dog bones, sheep, and pigs. 

While the first batch was in the oven, I mixed up another batch to make hand and foot prints to stash for Christmas.

The kids had something else in mind.

Sarah had the awesome idea of making dinosaur tracks.  FOSSILS! 

They made tail impressions, footprints, horn prints, and I even gave them a few seashells to play with.

From there, it was all about tire tracks and pizzas.

I'm hoping Sarah will take over the cooking at an early age. 

It would have been cool to bake the dino tracks to "fossilize" them, but somebody started a food fight, so the dough had to go away.

Once we baked the things, paint shirts went on and the critters got to work beautifying their medals.

The medal-winners with their hardware.

"Look, Mom, I won the purple in interpretive dance!"

We thought our neighbors might like a couple for being champion kindergartners.

Happy Saturday!