Cleaning with toys with boys!

If your are anything like mine they love to dump things.  After a little of playing in any room everything gets scattered.  They often tell me it is part of their game.

making patterns with spools

Today we made some patterns with little wooden spools.  Then we became log loaders and delivery trucks. At clean up time no one really wanted to help, until... 

Mommy's truck starts the clean up

Mommy's flat bed ruck started down the road to deliver some important packages to the store.  "Oh my look at all the different buckets that we emptied.  Maybe we can sort them all into the right spots."

Some of our mess

Little bears bed of spools

Mj's truck pushes some blocks

Caterpillar gets into the action

The boys had a fun time cleaning with me and using their toys to help.  Some times it works so much better to work with where they are at rather than nag about cleaning.

How do you get your kids to clean up?

Child's Play

The boys and cousin E were playing with all our bins of objects (magnets, shells, feathers, rocks...).  I had started by making a few magnet pictures for them.  Later when TJ got at the camera he took some interesting photos of their work.

This last one reminds me of an eye spy book.  I think I've got an idea brewing!  We may be making out own eye spy book in the coming months.

**************************

Thank you to all who came by to visit my facebook page.  MeAgain Creations now has 24 likes.  I'd love to get up and over 30 by the end of the week.  I also made 4 sales over the weekend!! Those people got to take advantage of the sale I had on.

Please stop by and visit my store.  I have big plans to add more items.  In the mean time I encourage custom orders and requests for items.

What happened to summer?

HAPPY FALL! Officially  is over as far as the calendar is concerned.  We spent all summer outside.  I hardly had to think of any interesting activities to do with the boys.  I think our sandbox is half empty now and there is no grass under the swing, but that is how it should be!

This week has been cold and rainy.   I feel bad for the kids going off to school.  I wanted to share a few indoor ideas to get you going.  PLEASE SHARE MORE IDEAS with us in the comment section.  I know these ideas are pretty obvious.  I promise I'll be getting more creative as the fall rolls on.

Painting - remember is it the process not the final product the children enjoy.  Try painting on grocery store flyers or your junk mail.  Use different products other than paint like baby food or pudding.  Use different brushes, feathers, potato masher...

Pipcleaners in the colander - these make for funny hats

Lacing - use pipe cleaners, shoe laces or string.  Try buttons, beads, cherios, noodles.

Cutting - let them loose with safety sisors and junk mail!

Mail - help them to creat their own letters.  You could play post office or even surprise the grandpatents with real mail!

Baking - everyone loves food and eating what they've made.

Play dough - we make our own and even bring other toys in to the mix

Puppets - you could make your own or just bring out a few old favourites.

Boxes - Grab some boxes and get creative.  You don't just need a large one, smaller boxes make great castles.

Play cars - we made some roads out of old jeans.

Trains - set up some kitchen chairs and go on a grand adventure.  We go to the lake (couch), mountains (fire place), and the zoo (to collect toy animals)

Technology - young children could also use the internet, computer or Wii.

Tactile play - bring your water table inside or grab a big tub and fill it with rice or dry pasta.  You could be brave and try shaving cream, jello, pudding or water.

Forts - some chairs and blankets and you've got an awesome club house!

Basically I encourage you to embrace some mess, bring out your inner child, get into your child's creative play and have a fun time inside.  I'm also all about dressing for the weather and getting outside.  Check around my blog for some of our outside adventures and more crafts and activities.

Nature Treasure Hunt

I saw this idea on I am Momma Hear Me Roar  a while back.  TJ and I have been enjoying playing outside more often so I thought it would be fun to try out our own nature treasure hunt together.  He got all dressed up and brought a friend with him.  I loved to watch how excited TJ got when we found something on the list.  Afterwards he reviewed what we had found for several days and talked about the pictures on the box. We'll have to do this again maybe with different items.

The blank spot on our container was for TJ to choose his own treasure.  He picked some flowers to add to our collection.

Friday's Favourites: I Spy Alphabet Game

This week TJ has been learning the alphabet.  We borrowed the Leap Frog movie Letter Factory from the library.  I think he has requested it several times a day all week.  Amazingly TJ has leaned the alphabet and all the letter sounds just from watching the DVD.  I was planing in the fall to do a little program/ activities and such with him, but I guess there may be no need.

I was thinking of a way to practice his letters when the idea came to me.  Most people know how to play I-Spy.  You think of an object and the other person guesses what it is.  The only clue they have is the colour.  For example "I- Spy with my little eye something that is green."  Oh I bet you didn't know it was my PJ's (I'm blogging very late at night).

Here is how we play, because TJ hasn't quite grasped the concept of the real game yet.  He just looks around to find anything that is the colour or starts with the letter I give him.

Mom: "I spy with my little eye something that starts with M."
Mom: "What does the M say?"
Tim: "mmmmm"
Tim: "I know mmmm, Mommy!"

He has been asking to play all week.  We've also been practicing what the letters say by going through his Thomas the Train Alphabet cards.  We also try out the ASL sign for the letters too.  We watch Signing Time videos to practice our signs.

What alphabet activities are you doing?

Fabric Roads

I have decided I must have some kind of craft attention deficit disorder.  Let's call it CADD.  Every time I get onto my computer I find some new craft I want to make.  I get all excited and drop what I'm doing to start this new project.  In yesterday's post I mentioned that I really need to tackle the mess in my bedroom.  Since I also share my room with my crafts (and my hubby), I may need to tackle some unfinished projects before I can clean.

Here is my list of half done projects to finish:
- 2 bean bags waiting to be stuffed and sewn
- 6 placemats to finish appliques and add a backing
- 1 dress needing the facing and hem
- 1 dress mostly cut out
- 4 quilt squares waiting for two pieces of material each
- 20 (soon to be 24) quilt squares needing to be assembled
- 2 shirts wanting to be modified/updated

The reason I'm going on about all this is because I got distracted Monday night.  While looking for some material online I came across this great idea for fabric roads at Seven Thirty Three.  Yesterday I dropped everything and went about making our own set of roads.  I decided to use up several pairs of my husbands old jeans (he donated them to me a long time ago).

Our roads were extremely simple to make.  I cut 6 inch wide strips of jeans in various lengths. I decided to use the wrong side of the material because the other side is stained and they are all different shades of blue/dirt.

 I didn't sew them or anything because I don't think they'll fray that much.  I used yellow puffy paint to draw the lines on the roads.  Total cost $2 for the paint!

 I still need to make some curved roads.  I'll just add that to my list!!

I linked this post up to the following:
Sew Much Ado

Lil' Luna- All Good Things

My Delicious Ambiguity

Friday's Favourites: Making roads

TJ loves all things about cars and trucks.  A while ago I came into the family room and he was unrolling the paper towels all over the floor.  He said he wanted to build a road.  In my attempt to save the paper towel I gave him a roll of calculator paper that we weren't using.  This one little roll of paper kept him busy for hours over the course of a few days.

We taped the paper to the floor to make roads.

He crumpled it all up to play in spaghetti.

He made himself a tail.

MJ had a great time getting into the paper too.

I'm discovering the fun of letting loose and making a mess.

Friday's Favourites: Faces Game

It's Friday!!  Here I will share with you something that was our favourite thing this week.

For the past two weeks TJ has been coming up to me randomly during the day and asking me to play our faces game.  I taught him how different emotions look on your face to help him express himself.  TJ is a very intense and sensitive child.  He feels things very strongly and expresses himself usually with a scream, although all his screams sound alike so we never know if he is hurt or happy.  Now TJ knows some faces to uses along with words to describe how he feels.

Here is how we play:

TJ: Mommy lets play faces.
Me: Okay show me a mad face

 TJ: Mommy you show me a sad face

 Me: Great! How about a happy face (he is working on smiling)

 TJ: Here is my sleeping face

Well you get the idea.  You can do all sorts of emotion.  We are also practicing our sign language so we try to sign to go with our face when we can.