22 Feb 2012 4 Comments

Arts and Crafts Wednesdays

Ever since Amelia was a baby, we’ve had a pretty busy schedule. I’m not suited to staying home and keeping my kid entertained all day, so I’ve been making sure we get out to do things. At 8 months, she started swim class. At 10 months, we joined Gymboree. Last fall, we started dance class, and best of all, two days a week at pre-school. In between all of that, there hasn’t been a ton of time for arts and crafts.

Besides time, it always seemed kind of daunting. There are some toddlers who have the ability to be calm and patient, to listen and follow directions. My toddler is not one of them. For the longest time, she would put everything in her mouth, and I know all of that stuff says it’s non-toxic, but I wasn’t excited at the idea of my child eating paint and glue.

But now she’s gotten better at actually paying attention (and understanding) when I explain things to her, and she rarely puts things in her mouth anymore. Our Gymboree schedule changed because she moved up to the next level, and so suddenly we have Wednesday afternoons completely free. I decided this will be our dedicated arts and crafts day.

The first project I got from our friend E’s blog, where she describes so many fun projects she does with her toddler. I read her posts and always think, “This looks fun, I should do this sometime.” Well, today we finally tried Monoprinting.

I didn’t have a paint roller, so I had to use a sponge to spread the paint out on our acrylic surface. Amelia pressed down on the sponge too hard and didn’t really understand how to spread it out evenly, so I had to do that part. The Q-tip pattern was all her, though, and she had a blast! We did four of them in all, because she insisted on using all our colors. The first one, in yellow, didn’t turn out well at all. Amelia “helped” press the paper down, and she moved it so that the paint got smeared and covered up the pattern.

The second one was a little bit better, but the paint still got smeared quite a bit.

The third time, I decided to use two colors, just to see if it would turn out more interesting, and because doing one at a time would take forever. I knew Amelia wouldn’t allow this project to stop until we’d used all her colors. This one definitely turned out better than the previous two.

The fourth time was a charm! I alternated the blue and red paint side by side, and Amelia spent a lot more time drawing patterns on this one. I made sure she didn’t touch it while I pressed the paper down, but I let her peel off the paper, and voila!

This one looks so cool I’m going to frame it and hang it on a wall somewhere. I also think that eventually I want the wall decor in this house to be 100% Amelia’s art and Justin’s photographs. That would be awesome.

by Bekke

19 Feb 2012 No Comments

Going To Sleep

Amelia has consistently napped 60-90 minutes a day for quite a while now, but suddenly in the past couple of weeks, she’s been waking up after only 40-50 minutes. I’m not sure if this is the beginning of the end of naps, but I am sure that it’s really, really annoying. Especially when you take into account the 10 minutes I spend in her bed after she falls asleep before I’m confident I won’t wake her when I get up. That leaves me with approximately half an hour to get some work done. Not good.

One day I tried getting her to go back to sleep. It worked. She was snoring! But as soon as I tried to get up, she woke up. Three times I tried to escape and failed, so eventually I gave up and said naptime was over.

Today was sort of a repeat of that very scenario, except when I was halfway to the door and she opened her eyes, I said, “Mama’s going downstairs. You go back to sleep, okay?”

Guess what she said!

She said, “Okay!”

So I left. Stood outside the door for a while, expecting to hear crying or the doorknob turning. Neither happened. So I went downstairs. About 15-20 minutes later, she wakes up again. Sigh.

It was a small victory but a step in the right direction. Eventually this kid will go to sleep on her own, in her own room, and she’ll stay there all night. Hopefully it’ll happen before she goes to college…

by Bekke

12 Feb 2012 No Comments

Valentine’s cards

Last year we went to a Valentine Exchange for the first time, and I had my mom send me some cute Norwegian troll postcards that I glued to the front of the cards, and then Amelia (16 months old at the time) put stickers on the cards, which she loved.

This year I wanted to make the cards from scratch, and I had a really hard time finding anything I liked, until I stumbled across this idea. So cute! So perfect!

So much work!!!

I had to make 40 of these, half for today’s Exchange and half for Amelia’s school friends on Tuesday. I thought I was being so brilliant by designing the three different parts on my computer and then printing it all out on cardstock. Well, turns out that I could easily cut 2-3 sheets at once, so it would have been helpful if only the top sheet had a pattern on it. Because the other 1-2 sheets had patterns, too, and they didn’t always align correctly, or I wasn’t able to be precise enough to cut along the lines I couldn’t see. So I guess I’ve learned something for the next time I do a project like this.

Amelia enjoyed “helping” with the different stages of making the cards. I had extra cardstock, so she was able to use her little safety scissors and cut them up to her heart’s content. She’s pretty good with those scissors for a 2-year-old, meaning she hasn’t hurt herself. Yet.

Next stage, gluing the pieces together, she got her own glue stick and was having fun with that. Then I did all the writing on them, and she played with the markers. Finally, I glued on the hearts and eyes, and this was the part where she actually (kind of sort of) helped. She was very liberal with the glue on about half the pieces, getting glue on the front and the back, so I couldn’t always use what she’d done, but at least I can say that she helped a little bit. And she definitely enjoyed herself.

All in all, it took me 6-7 hours (over 3 days) to make all the cards. Next year Amelia will be almost 3 1/2, so hopefully by then her motor skills will have improved enough and she’ll have a bit more understanding and interest in following patterns to take a bigger part in making the cards. It is, in my opinion, the only fun part of an otherwise pretty worthless and blatantly commercial holiday. Yes, I’m a Valentine’s Day grinch. So sue me.

by Bekke

05 Feb 2012 No Comments

The Inevitable Incident

So, a pool safety fence is not in our budget right now, meaning Amelia can’t be out back by herself. Justin has been cleaning the pool on the weekends, and I’m out there making sure Amelia doesn’t bug him or end up in the pool. This week I got her a small skimmer net so that she could “help” clean the pool, which was a big hit.

After the pool was clean it was time to use the other purchase of the week: a solar cover, to heat up the pool and reduce how often it needs to be cleaned. While we were wrestling with the cover, we took our eyes off the kiddo, and because she’s been pretty careful around the pool so far, we were surprised to suddenly hear screaming.

Yup, she fell in the pool. We think she might have thought she could stand on the cover. Luckily, she fell in right above the steps, so she didn’t even get her hair wet, but she did get scared and cold.

Hopefully this will make her even more cautious around the pool. I don’t think she really “got it” before when we told her the water was really cold. What’s cool is that when Justin ran over and fished her out, she had already grabbed the wall. This is something she learns in the safety part of her swim class: if you fall in, turn around and grab the wall. She did the same thing last summer at the public pool when she ran ahead of me and jumped in. I’m glad that the swim classes aren’t a waste of money!

by Bekke

01 Feb 2012 No Comments

Secrets

Amelia just helped me hide Justin’s Valentine’s Day present. When we were done, the following conversation took place.

A: “I hide Papa present.”

Me: “Yes, thank you.”

A: “He can’t find it.”

M: “That’s right. And you can’t tell him about it, okay? You have to keep it a secret.”

A: [puts her hand on my cheek and looks seriously into my eyes] “I promise.”

I guess we’ll find out if a 2-year-old really can keep a secret…

by Bekke