No shampoo! Or, Another revelation.

I decided this week I would try out a method of hair washing I had heard about a number of times recently.

This method involves no shampoo, only baking soda, water and apple cider vinegar.

If it were to work, I would be able to cut my $20 bottle(s!) of shampoo out of the shopping budget, AND, I would stop lacing my scalp with a mixture of Sodium laurel sulphate, Methlyparaben and Ethylparaben, to name but a few of the less desirable ingredients.

I'm a bit particular about my hair, it's dark, longish and wavyish and I like it.
(Ok, this is an old photo, this lil guy is 5 now, but my hair is largely the same.
Umm, just more grey.)

Usually, I like it.

But not right now because I'm sporting a REALLY BAD HAIRCUT which I detailed here.

However, a really bad haircut combined with nasty looking greasy hair would be much worse, so I decided the time is right to try this new method, as I am not working outside the home. Mostly.

The worst that would happen is the lifeguards at the pool would reel back in horror and the other mums in the playground would keep their distance.

So try it I did.

And it works!

My hair is just as it should be, apart from the bad haircut of course.

It's not greasy, or too dry, or heaven forbid, smelling of vinegar.

And a big positive, my scalp is much less itchy than it has been lately, I have a feeling all the nasties in my expensive shampoo where drying out and irritating my scalp.

Here's what to do if you would like to try it:

Wet your hair. Duh.

Make a thickish paste of baking soda with a bit of water.

Massage the paste onto your scalp.

Rinse it off well.

Mix about 1/4 cup of apple cider vinegar with 3/4's cup of water. More or less.

Rinse your scalp and the length of your hair with this.

Rinse with water. Or not. I did.

Dry as normal.

How easy, and cheap, and environmentally friendly is that???

I love it!

Going on a bear hunt, gonna catch a big one!

Well, technically it was a fossil dig, but I have read that book sooooooo many times lately I just had to work that in somewhere.

This activity was one we did while we were house sitting a month or two ago and I've been meaning to show it off for a while. It's a fabulous thrifty activity and you can tweak it to the interests of your particular child.

The idea is to make some fossils out of salt dough, bury them and let the kids dig 'em up again.

Inspired, huh?! 

Though I must confess the original idea is not mine, I found it on another blog (of course!) but I cannot for the life of me remember which one. So if it was yours, feel free to let me know and I'll link it up.

What to do

Salt dough recipes are a dime a dozen on the net, so just find one and make a quantity of dough.

Now, take smallish pieces of your dough and press shapes onto them. 

We used toy animals.....their footprints, imprints of their scaly skin, the sides of small animals pressed straight onto the dough and made some bone shaped pieces too.

Bake them according to your recipe's instructions.

Let them cool.

At this point, you may want to seal them with something, such as mod podge or PVA glue or whatever you like. 

We didn't do this and the sand we used was a tiny bit damp, so seeing as the kids wanted to keep the shapes afterwards, we spent about an hour with a small paint brush brushing the sand off them.

My advice is seal them first.

Bury them in a sandpit. 

If it's a big one, only bury them within a certain section of it, otherwise the kids will lose interest and you'll have to help them find them all. 

Ask yourself how I know that?

Get searching!

So much fun, even the dogs wanted in on it.

No-cook playdough....a revelation!

Just for fun the other week I looked up a no-cook playdough recipe.

I can't remember why, possibly because I was house-sitting and didn't have my regular cooked playdough recipe handy.

Well, I'm converted.

No messy pot to clean up. (Have I told you I'm lazy?)

No funky smell while it's cooking.

And it's less sticky than the cooked variety. Not that the cooked variety is very sticky at all but the no-cook recipe turns out firmer and more like the store bought product.

Now, I can't lay my hands on the exact recipe I used, I probably just scribbled it down on some scrap of paper so it has long since disappeared.

But the recipe was something like this one, I know it included boiling water, as opposed to cold...

No-cook Playdough

4 cups plain flour

2 cups salt

2 tablespoons of cream of tartar

3 tablespoons of cooking oil

food colouring of choice

3 1/2 - 4 cups of boiling water

(This particular version of no-cook playdough comes from The Slightly Mad Quilt Lady)

Essentially, you just throw it all in a bowl and mix it up well.

And look at the colours....

The house we stayed at had gel food colouring so we used that for colour, which is pretty vibrant..

But the pre-school my 5 year old goes to uses powdered paint for colour and that produces playdough that jumps off the table and screams at you to come and play.

So don't forget fresh playdough as a great thrifty activity for a cold, rainy (Melbourne) day.

And, it's value in smoothing out the nerves of a cranky, crabby child.

Homemade birthday cakes

I don't claim to know how much a store-bought decorated cake costs as I have never bought one, but I'm pretty sure it's going to be much cheaper to make your own.

And most probably it will taste better and if you like, it could be better for you, too.

This year, my about-to-turn 5 year old requested a Batman ice cream cake.

Um, right.

That means I won't be using my best ever birthday cake cake recipe.

And I even resorted to the idea that I would source and buy the Batman decal for the top of said ice cream cake. Because my decorating skills......and time and patience....only stretch so far.

Except by the time I came to this realisation, it was Friday afternoon before a long weekend.

And I needed the cake for Monday of course.

So, a trip to the grocery store to buy 2 x 2 litre tubs of ice cream, a rummage through the cupboards to unearth some marshmallows (expired but hey, they worked) and the appropriate colours, hubby on the net finding the Batman insignia and wah lah!

I was ready to cake it up.

My idea was to squash the ice cream into the correct sized spring form tin....that's the circle tin with the removable base, and make some marshmallow fondant with which to decorate the top.

And, it worked, see?

The marshmallow fondant recipe is here.

I used yellow colour and tumeric for the yellow and I mixed cocoa and black colour for the black. Although to get it really black in a short space of time (it was nearly 10pm Sunday night) I painted black food colour directly on it.

Now, I'm not big on my kids eating food colouring, or marshmallows for that matter, but I was 99.99% sure they would not want to eat this topping.

It certainly tastes ok but it's just not their thing, so I was happy enough adding as much colour as I needed.

Phew, another birthday cake success.

Note to self: be more organised, remember your 1st post of 2010!!