Cooking with Kids: Face and Hair Masks

Instead of our usual Cooking Day last week, I enlisted the help of the girls (3 years old) to make an Oatmeal Yogurt Face Mask and an Avocado Hair Mask.  What's more fun than 'cooking up' mushy stuff to slather all over your face and hair?  Here's what we did...

For the face mask, the girls mixed up plain yogurt with fine oatmeal (baby oatmeal, actually).  The girls laughed hysterically when I put it on their faces (it was really cold!), and thought it was even funnier that Mommy was putting it on too (I could really use a facial!).  I got one picture of the mask on L, but the photo looks like she has a strange skin disease, so I better keep it off the internet... 

For the avocado hair mask, I let the girls mash up some avocado with olive oil.  I would have done this in the food processor, but it was dirty from smoothies we'd made earlier, so the girls mashed the avocado with a whisk.  They didn't do such a great job, so they ended up with avocado chunks all over their hair which I had to comb out in their bath.  The good news is that this mask helped condition their hair enough to let me take the tangles out (their curly hair gets pretty wild!).  The bad news is that it left their hair looking really greasy for a couple days (I'm glad I didn't use it in mine!).

I'm afraid it will still be a while before my little girls can really enjoy the experience of getting pampered at a spa, but in the meantime this mini-spa 'cooking' experience is a lot of fun.  (By the way, after the oatmeal yogurt face mask, my skin felt tight and rejuvenated - nice bonus for Mommy).