There is a woman out there who is my parenting hero. She is the friend of a friend—and the proud mother of four-year-old triplets and a two-year-old boy. If you ever chance upon her blog, you’ll soon discover that she has more energy and does more stuff with her four preschoolers than I can ever hope to accomplish with my single three-and-a-half-year-old boy.

Paper egg painted with salt drip

When I feel shattered in the evening—which, let’s face it, happens pretty much every day—I wonder how she does it. Oh, and she also finds the time to scour the Internet for crafty projects to do with her kids. The good news for me is that she shares her findings on her blog. Through her, I discovered The Learning Box Preschool programme and, lately, Preschool Express—a great resource for seasonal children’s crafts. I found a couple of really good Easter ideas there, which Niccolo and I immediately set out to try.

My favourite was painting paper eggs. Jean Warren, the woman behind Preschool Express, suggests painting them with a mix of tempera and cornstarch for a porcelain-like finish. But I suffer from a deep-set inability to follow instructions without making changes, so I decided to use salt drip instead. Nicco and I had already used it to decorate Valentine’s hearts and it gives the paper a lovely raised, rough texture.

So I made the salt drip (1 cup of flour, 1/3 cup of salt, food colouring and enough water to reach a dripping consistency) and we painted away. The end result made Nicco “really proud”—his words, not mine.