Pink and Sandy

Oh my goodness! It's time for snow to be gone. I am not even kidding.
The cold and the snow have kept us stuck inside the house for a couple weeks now, and we are starting to get sick of the house and sick of our toys and sick of each other. (Besides the fact that we were all sick for a while. sigh) 
So yesterday I was sitting there trying to get Sam interested in some trucks that he was like, SO over, and I al of a sudden thought about the bag of play sand I had sitting in my basement (left over from this project like... 4 years ago), and thought that might be just the thing to liven our afternoon and refresh our bored little pickle.
So I grabbed a shallow tub, the bag of sand, a large plastic table cloth, and a couple toys. We didn't have much in the way of sand toys, but you don't need much, do you?

We'd been playing with cotton balls in his dump truck (we play with cotton balls a lot. Good, cheap, easy to clean up sensory fun) so those, along with his trucks made it to the sand box.
This was the first time Sam had ever played in the sand and he was mesmerized just plunging his hands in and wigging his fingers around in it. He never got much into driving his trucks through the sand...

But I did get out the stacking measuring cups, and he LOVED digging with those.
I bet you are dying to know if my one year old could control his compulsion to put handfuls of this funny new substance in his mouth???

Nope. He couldn't. He sampled two handfuls before deciding it wasn't yummy. Which you are probably thinking I should be more upset about. But here's my thought. The kid is going to sample sand at some point in his life. I'd rather it be relatively 'clean' sand in a tub in my kitchen than at a park that stray cats are pooping in, am I right? So he came to his own conclusions (Sand is not tasty) and he survived (no noticeable physical repercussions to the small amount of ingested sand). So we got that childhood milestone out of the way. Yay eating sand.
When he got bored scooping up sand and cotton balls with the measuring cups, I got a water spray bottle and wet down the sand a little and we built sand castles...

(I grabbed a leftover paper straw from his birthday party to make it look legit... Sam liked poking that in the sand too.) I showed him how the sand sticks together when it's wet. He liked spraying it with the bottle too, because the water would bead on the surface, then soak in. We talked about how different it feels. I tried to come up with different adjectives to describe it for him. Think, Mama think!
Wet/dry, cool, grainy, firm, squooshy, sticky, pink, bright, colorful, sandy (duh), smooth, bumpy/hilly, pliable, gritty... Not Tasty. haha

When he was starting to get bored with the water and building things, I just picked him up and plopped him down in the tub of sand. It's funny how a different perspective (sitting IN and not BESIDE the sand) made the same object so much more interesting!

Look at those happy little toes kicking around in the sand! Love it.

When he was finally done playing (we got about 30 minutes of sand play before he was tired of it-- impressive attention span for my little pickle!) we stood him up on the plastic table cloth and brushed the sand from his clothes. Then I put him in his seat, and I was able to fold the table cloth so all the sand fell to the middle, then funneled it back into the tub, put the lid on, and put it all away for another afternoon of play.  Relatively easy clean up for what could have been a huge crazy mess.
Okay, yes, I still had to sweep up some pick sand from the kitchen floor, but it wasn't horrible. I really really think he had fun.
I think next time we play sand I might make it a discovery box for him... burying small toys in the sand for him to find. Or mixing in pasta shapes? (wheels, bowties, etc) There is no limit to the interesting things we can bury and play with in the sand. Anyway, we had a fun.
What are you doing to bust the indoor blues with your kiddos? Any other ideas to keep a wiggly toddler busy?