Fun with Footprints

During our short-lived visit to the beach yesterday (the temperature dropped from 83 at our house to 59 at the beach), I stopped in at the state park office to pick up a Junior Ranger booklet for the kids. I thought it would be a fun way to incorporate some "Science" into our summer vacation. Ian was thrilled with the idea of solving Science mysteries.

The weather is pretty rotten today: pretty hot, but with thunderstorms blowing through, so the kids couldn't go in the pool. They were (are) grumpy and I was fast becoming so. I thought of the book and hoped there was an activity in it that we could do inside the house. Thankfully, there was. We traced our feet - one foot with a shoe on and one with no shoe. Then the kids tried to draw in the parts that were missing, like toes and tread patterns.

It was fun, but finished up way too quickly, so I decided to keep the track theme going and make some more footprints. Call me crazy, but I let my kids stand in paint and then walk across some long pieces of paper.
It went surprisingly well, with only a few little messes at the end. What you can't see in the picture is the massive "Cleaning station" at the end of the paper with soapy water in a bucket and piles of rags and ratty old towels. We also made hand and footprints on smaller pieces of paper for me to put in their baby books.
Blair even got in on the printing action - although she hated it.

Thank you guest photographer Ian for capturing this part of the project. At least the most important stuff is in the picture, if not quite centered. (His other shots were less useful, unless you wanted to see the spider web in the corner above the back door.)
Aren't her little 9-month-old feet cute?