One Inch World

Want to practice your cranking? Rebecca is fascinated by both baby food and the food mill. She wants her own bowl of baby rice cereal at meal times. It wouldn’t have occurred to me, but here she is, working on grinding up a quarter of a peanut butter and jam sandwich… Mmmm… She ate that quarter and then ground another one. Whatever floats their boats, right? (Still old pre-move projects.)

I wanted Rebecca to be involved in making the valentines for her classmates tomorrow, which is challenging, since we have to make 26ish of them, and that takes some stamina. At first I was planning on doing some stenciling, I cut out some hearts, and I wanted her to use the spray bottles of liquid water colors we have to paint hearts onto watercolor paper. But. For some reason when the girls use these they feel that they have to hold them really close to the paper, and anything other than fully covering to a drippy mess is unacceptable. So the first stencil was filled to overflowing with red watercolor paint. You can guess it didn’t come out looking like a heart. We moved on to plan 2!

On each piece of watercolor paper I drew a secret heart picture, nothing complicated, and Rebecca sprayed and painted watercolors over the top until she could see the whole picture. And yes, I did use a moving box as my backdrop, my house is covered in them! Should I be packing right now? Yes…

Yes, I realize that the winter holidays are so last month! And frankly, we did this last month, but there you go, right now my house is full of moving boxes and not so full of exciting crafts! Two weeks to go.

The pine cones were a Friday Art Group project, we painted them white and then sprinkled them with kosher salt – it comes in larger flakes than table salt, but not so large as rock salt, and makes reasonable glitter substitute. We have no glitter in our house. Okay, we have one bottle of clear plastic glitter somewhere, but I don’t know where, and if I did I might not say.

The mini tree is a dead bonsai tree my husband gave me… We stuck it in some flour play dough and baked it. Somehow the tree wicked up the salt (maybe it was salt dough, honestly I don’t remember, it keeps a disgracefully long time.) and turned whiter than it was to start with, kinda cool. We hung lots of little mini ornaments on it with tweezers and fingers. It was a great fine motor activity, and lots of fun. The mini ornaments consist mostly of plastic beads and sequins in various arrangements strung on earring wires from the craft store. I have them from years ago, but next year I should find more earring wires (just short wires with a flat bump at the end – you could just twist a loop instead) and let Rebecca make the ornaments. I don’t think that tree is going to make it to next year, maybe we will have to use one of the still-living bonsai, it would be much sturdier too, even if it wouldn’t give as much of the ‘winter’ aspect.

Look at that absorbed concentration! Present your child with some halved avocados, a spoon, a bowl, a masher, and an open jar of salsa and they can make guacamole for dinner for you. Or at least start it. Important and appreciated work for the family. Also great fine motor work and strengthening with all that scooping.

Notice the haircut? That was a christmas morning present. She’s been wanting that consistently for quite a while, and now that it’s done I like it too, surprisingly enough! (I’m firmly in the long hair camp myself.) She slouched quite a lot when I was cutting off her ponytail, when it was off and she straightened up I was rather shocked at how short she had managed to get it without my noticing! Chin length in front, but up above her hairline in back. And so she ended up with a reverse bob, because that was what happened, and it was practically instantly exactly the haircut that she should have had, no getting used to it period, no who’s child are you? And I would have had no idea how to get there if it hadn’t happened by accident!

We needed something to do, so we made this clothes line out of a pipe cleaner and some cardboard triangles, and some paper clothes to hang up. I cut out the clothes and Rebecca drew on them, then hung them on the clothes line with mini clothes pins. To get the clothes line to stay up we had to put some rocks in the cardboard triangles, maybe someone has a better idea for how to make a clothes line? This one is pretty simple.

Today, through Kiva.org, I loaned $50 to a sweet maker in Mexico. Join me in my December drive to give a helping hand to people in poverty.

I was tired of the if-I-lose-I’m-not-going-to-play fight, so I needed a new game that you can’t loose. We have a bunch of cut up paintings for glueing, and I glued them in a random strongly connected network. You could draw circles or squares on a piece of paper and draw lines between them, or make them overlap. On our board there were lots of loops, thus lots of ways to get from here to there. (There are pictures inside the loops, but I would leave those out if I was drawing it again, they were just decoration, and distracting.) Get out two game people and another ‘goal’ marker, we used wooden beads and a triangle block. Place them randomly on the board. Each person gets to take turns rolling a die and moving that many spaces whichever direction they want. Whoever gets to the ‘goal’ marker first, the OTHER person gets to put it wherever they want on the board.

It took Rebecca a little while to get the hang of if she wanted to move the triangle, she had to let ME get there first. It’s sort of an anti-racing game. Good practice to break the I-must-get-there-first mentality.