Happy Cinco de Mayo!

Today we celebrated Cinco de Mayo by making a pinata and having yummy tacos for supper. Here you see the kids making pinata paste out of flour and water. Michael thinks it is pretty yummy. Sarah was in charge of squishing the flour lumps, and she did a great job! David is overseeing the whole thing.

After mixing up the paste, we took it outside with some newspapers and a balloon to start building our pinata. Everyone enjoyed dipping the newspaper strips into the gluey goop and smearing them onto the balloon. Our first balloon popped, but we quickly blew up another and stuck the glops of newspaper all over it. It worked pretty well, and we were able to finish it up without incident, other than the dried flour paste all over everyone's hands and clothes.

The pinata dried for most of the afternoon, sitting in the sun on a sand bucket. David and I were just discussing whether everyone else would want to see the balloon pop when they drove up in the van from their trip to find a bicycle tire innertube. It made a really neat sound when the balloon pulled away from the dried newspaper!

To decorate our pinata, we decided to use the gold spray paint leftover from Christmas. That was fun! Dan finished filling and decorating it while the kids rode their bike/tricycle/little car around the parking lot.

Here is the finished pinata from our fiesta:

We had a great time trying to break it with an ice scraper. The directions said to make 3 layers of newspaper, but we've always had trouble breaking homemade pinatas, so we only did one layer, and it still took us quite a while to get through it! Next time, we will try reinforcing the top while making the bottom a little less sturdy.