I love when crazy bad experiences lead to super genius creations. In my case, it was a bath paint mess. I don’t have pictures of the original mess because it happened quite a while ago but I’ll tell you the story.

Mr. Perfect and I were on a business trip/vacation to Las Vegas for a week and Mimi (my mom) was taking care of the kids. She found toddler crayons (pictured below) and thought they were for the bath. They are SO NOT for the bath! So all three of my lovely artsy children took turns creating masterpieces all over (and I mean ALL OVER) the shower walls with these crayons. Mimi didn’t think to wash it off when bath time was over either. When I came home it was definitely an OMG moment! It took HOURS of scrubbing with vinegar and Mr. Clean Magic Erasers to get all of the crayon off but luckily I had 3 lovely artists to help

Non-Bath Toddler Crayons

From then on, I made it my mission to find a cheap and easy way to let the kids be creative during bath time (have you seen how much bath art supplies are at the store?).

Do you have shaving cream and food coloring at your house? Then you can make paint!

Ingredients

Shaving Cream (foam NOT gel)
Food Coloring
Muffin Tin (or small bowls)
Mixing Stick (I used a chopstick)
Paintbrush

Directions

Get your muffin tin (or bowls, or whatever) and fill each section full up with shaving cream. Use your stir stick to make a small hole in middle of each dollop of cream (this is easier said than done). Working one section and one color at a time, drop 5-10 drops of food coloring (depending on if you want colors lighter or darker) in the little hole you made and stir up thoroughly with your stick. Once you have all the colors mixed, give the pan of “paint”and a brush to your child and tell them to get creative. Boomer enjoyed putting a little of each color on his hand and making “poo” and Pookie spent all his time making a giant monster.

The colors of the paint will look pretty narly (from all the times they don’t rinse the brush) by the time the kids are done but it can also be a good opportunity to teach about primary colors/the color wheel and mixing.

When bath time is over and the tub is draining, the simple way to clean up is just to splash water on the shower walls and dunk the pan underwater. It really is as easy as that!