More projects

Several years ago, the summer of the first year I began teaching (10 years ago, eek!) I discovered I must have projects in the works. Whether it is designing and building a quilt, board game, outdoor landscape, or water coloring and sketching, I have to have an outlet for all the crazy things floating in my head. I've been a bit of a lock-in lately with my youngest being sick for nearly a week now, and today was the first day I felt he was well enough to venture out...so we went to Lowe's and (evil) Wal*Mart for some inspiration. And we found it! With Ian happily crawling around and getting into stuff for the first time in days (aka I didn't have to hold him 14 hours of the day), Oliver and I designed some fun manipulatives.

The first one is a "Melissa and Doug" inspired Build Your Own Felt Sandwich. I saw this for about $25 and knew it'd be a great Christmas present. But for about $5 of felt and colored Sharpies, we designed our own!

We've got 3 types of breads, (wheat, pumperknickel roll, and baguette), condiments (mayo, ketchup and mustard), meats (salami, ham/turkey, and peperoni), cheddar cheese, and veggies (lettuce, tomatoes, purple onion, mushrooms, bell pepper, pickles/cucumber). I say it was a success since Oliver kept trying to feed the meat to some imaginary baby monsters. On a side note, he's now obsessed with Spider Man and was dressed in spider man pajamas and destroying monsters as I cut shapes out of felt. Apparently the babies are nice, as are their parent-monsters...so I had a nice conversation with the mommy-monster at Oliver's request. I think he's in need of a playdate, sheesh!!

Looking at the tasty sandwich parts, I think it'd be fun to do a pizza version, taco version, maybe desserts, I don't know. It's endless!

And the second toy is inspired by a woman at church who brings all kinds of cool things for her kids to work on. I saw one of them (which totally intrigued Oliver) and decided we could create that for Christmas too! So for about $8, we came up with this:

It's a rubber band board that even I had trouble stopping playing with long enough to eat dinner. There is a pretty wonky nail in there, but there must be a hard spot in the wood, certainly not my awesome hammer-skills...

Here's hoping we can get into more good stuff tomorrow...there are always ideas of things to make, the question is, will there be time tomorrow and will Ian be as easily distracted for that long again? We shall see!