Thanksgiving Handprint Art

**UPDATE**
I've moved to ladybugsandlattes.com
You can find this post and more here
***

I was feeling bold today. We did 3 painting projects. If you have (or had) a toddler, you might be thinking, "Is she crazy?".

Yeah, sometimes.

We missed a few days of art projects last week, and I had so many ideas that I wanted to do before Thanksgiving, which is only 2 days away.

First, I painted her hand brown and made a print on blue paper. This is to resemble the Mayflower. I cut out little white paper sails and used a glue stick to place them on the hand print. 1 done, 2 to go.

I cleaned off her little hand with a wet wipe and started painting the palm brown and the fingers different colors. I pressed it on orange paper and made a sad-looking turkey. Tried it again - still sad. Cady wiggles her fingers too much when I try to make hand prints with her. Oh well. I cut out the turkeys and glued them onto a plain piece of white paper along with the ship. 2 done, 1 to go.

The third project was only semi-planned. I knew that she was not going to be happy with me if I only made 3 hand prints with her and then put everything away when there were clearly several containers of finger paint sitting right there on the table. Avoiding the impending screams of toddler-hood, I gave her some scraps of white paper and let her paint with the brush or her fingers. She's only 15 months, so she doesn't know what she's painting; she just sees that she's manipulating the colors around on the paper. That's cool. I'll be creative.

I took her "scrap paper" paintings and cut them to look like leaves. Well, they kind of look like leaves.

I'm really creative in my head; it's the execution that's the problem.