After the Cereal Bar: Cereal Box Matching Game Tutorial

One thing about buying a LOT of cereal when it's on big sale is that you then eat a lot of cereal. And when you eat a lot of cereal, you accumulate a lot of cereal boxes. Cereal boxes, like toilet paper tubes, are one of those things that I just can't throw in the recycling bin. I KNOW I'll need them sometime.

And that's how my house accumulates a lot of cereal boxes and toilet paper tubes.

The shelf in my study held one too many empty Cascadian Farms Cinnamon Crunch box yesterday, and so the girls and I took some time off from goofing off and reading books and watching Clifford's frakking Puppy Days to first, of course, do the activities on the backs of all the boxes:

A board game played with dinosaur avatars is fun.

Some of the boxes didn't have stuff so elaborate on the back, but instead word searches and riddles and picture puzzles, etc., so I cut those backs off to save as a quiet car activity for Willow. A QUIET car activity--wouldn't that be nice?

I've seen cereal box matching game projects off and on all over the interweb--plumpudding's cereal box matching game is the one that I can most readily recall--and my matching game isn't much different. Since all my cereal boxes are Cascadian Farms boxes, all with a big bowl of whatever cereal it is on the front, I made my matching pairs from that big bowl of cereal. I cut two large circles out of each bowl--

--until I had enough for a good game. The nice thing about using boxes that are all from the same brand is that the insides of the boxes are all from exactly the same kind of carboard, and so match exactly.

This is a good matching game for Sydney, especially--

--because although the pairs clearly belong together, they don't match exactly. This requires pattern recognition and sorting skills to make a positive match, and these are good skills for little children to practice.

I still have more cereal boxes left--can you believe it? I may make a cereal box puzzle next...

A Mother's Day Miracle

If you happen to know anything about my Willow, my talented, incredible, painfully shy Willow, a child who refused to participate in her school's kindergarten ritual of Reader's Chair, a child who weekly declines to participate with her classmates in their class ritual of Speaker's Rug, a child who didn't even want to stand in front of the class on her birthday to be sung to, then you will likely be as amazed as I am at what I am about to tell you.

Willow played in her first guitar recital today.

I am amazed. Awe-struck. Astonished.

Much of the credit goes to Willow's sweet guitar teacher. On the way to her latest lesson, Willow said to me, "I decided that I don't want to do the recital." I said, "Oh, that's fine, sweetie. Just tell Maja that when we get there." We walk in the door to Maja's house, Maja greets Willow and then asks, "Are you excited about your guitar recital?" Willow pauses for a couple of seconds, then quietly answers, "Yes."

Much of the credit also goes to the IU Pre-College Program in Guitar, which I cannot recommend highly enough. If you've ever been the victim of a preschool teacher who treats a class concert with all the solemnity and pomp of a major Broadway opening, leaving a path of weeping children with stress ulcers in her wake (and I have been the victim of this, OFTEN), then you, too, would appreciate the calmness and matter-of-factness in which the director of this guitar program ran the recital: small, well-lit concert hall; children who sit with their parents until their turn and then return to their parents immediately afterward; ample applause both before and after; no microphones; and duets with their teachers for all the youngest players. The only telling point that this small concert was actually taking place in a venue of great importance was the niceness of the outside scenery--

--which was perfect for some pre-concert romping:

Ample pre-concert romping is absolutely essential:

Before the concert began, I gave Willow my camera to keep her entertained. This is how she saw her own first guitar recital:

Guitar Music (Willow performed "Little Bunny," as translated from Serbian

and transcribed by her Serbian guitar teacher)

Guitar (held by Daddy)

When Willow's name was called she marched right up to her smiling teacher on stage, played her (terribly dischordant, out of tune, and off-beat, but who cares?) song in duet with her, and marched right back to us again.

It was a miracle.

Fortunately, I am well versed in miracles:

I've made a couple of my own, you know.

Go On! Let the Baby Spray Paint!

What harm can it do? It's not like she going to sneak out after you put her to bed with her lullabies and stuffed lovies and go out to tag the city.

And if she does do that...well, at least she'll have mastered proper spray paint technique. I HATE it when I walk by some graffiti and I see those big splotches with drips coming down, like the tagger accidentally got the spray paint too close to the wall. Amateurs, seriously.

To teach your baby to spray paint, you will need:

• BIG paper. Seriously, spray paint is not a miniature art. We use those big pads of Strathmore drawing paper, but rolls of newsprint would also work awesomely.
• spray paint. 
• a vertical surface, not an easel. An easel just isn't big or vertical enough. Find a clothesline or a fence to clip your paper to, or attach it to the backs of a couple of chairs that you've got outside. You are outside, aren't you? Because you also need to be outside.

1. Show your child where to stand to maintain the proper distance from the paper. This is really important, because it's instinctive, it seems, to want to creep in closer and closer as you work, but that's not how spray painting is properly done. Spray paint a line on the grass for the kid to stay on, perhaps.

2. Depending on how strong your child is, the proper form that you show them for holding the spray paint will vary. Spray paint actually takes a bit of strength to use. Willow, who is five, can easily spray paint by holding the can in both her fists, fingers toward her paper, and depressing the nozzle with both her thumbs together.

3. Set your kid free!

For us, spray painting is a nice large muscle activity, one of those things that it's fun to do when you want to do some art but you're tired of the kid being a couch-lump in the house all day. Because the spray paint doesn't cake up on the paper, the artwork itself also remains a nice background medium for additional artwork. Will turned the particular piece of art that she created on this day into a sign for the craft fair, and it worked very well.

Next I think I'll have her spray paint her name real fancy across the side of the garage.

Four

One

Two

Three

FOUR!!!

Happy Birthday, wonderful, wonderful Sydney. May your year be filled with as many pink doughnuts and toy ponies as any child could wish for.

Spray Paint and Felt Cake: Craft Fair WIPs

Don't even ask me about my foot. I'm clearly going to have to go back to Promptcare tomorrow and have it amputated or something. Did I mention that the girls were playing with my sewing stuff yesterday and made a mess and therefore I stepped on a hand-sewing needle with my bare foot? Blunt end first? And I had to pull it out with my own two hands, although I thought for a minute that I was going to have to get some pliers?

SAME FOOT!!!!

So no, we're not talking about that foot anymore.

In other news, I've been hobbling around getting my butt in gear for the start of craft fair season on Saturday. The beginning of the season is always so panicky--so many signs to make! Change to aquire! Where's the duct tape? The last-minute panic hasn't yet set in, so today was mostly spent making felt cake--

--in large numbers:

Pimping the EZ-UP:

And no, we're also not talking about the sudden rainstorm that's occuring right now on said EZ-Up before the paint can cure. Just swear a few times inside your head for me.

And, of course, if I'M going to spray paint, then so must the child:

The other child was napping, after having screamed the entire walk home from Chocolate Moose about her skinned side. The second that we got home and I put a Band-aid on the skinned side, it was miraculously all better and she stopped screaming. I did not smack her.

And when Matt got home from work and saw that I was NOT lying down with my foot elevated, but instead SPRAY-PAINTING THE EZ-UP and LETTING THE CHILD SPRAY-PAINT and LETTING THE OTHER CHILD NAP IN THE LATE AFTERNOON SO THAT SHE WON'T GO TO SLEEP TONIGHT he didn't smack me, either. In fact, he brought home pizza (such act is entitled "Cooking Dinner on the Nights When Julie Doesn't Cook") AND helped me finish spray-painting AND took a photo of me looking all happy and relaxed:

Wait until he sees how many craft fair signs I need him to design for me tomorrow...

Good Foot vs. Bad Foot, and the Dinosaurs

My feet are making me very unhappy of late:

See that foot on the left? The one that's bigger than the foot on the right now? The one that's all swollen and hurts to walk on and has that huge, red, gross infection on top?

Yeah, I may have to get rid of that foot. It's been a big disappointment recently.

These are better:

I've been up and about more than I should, but even last night, after that darned disappointing foot forced me into bed with Grey Gardens for company, I could still cut out these felt dinos with my foot up. They're for my craft fair season that starts this Saturday, ideally to be joined by many more things to be sewn and done and otherwise manufactured, ideally to be done on two feet that are well and whole and permit me to stand and walk for as long as I want to.

As far as not meeting that ideal...we won't even discuss that.

P.S. Check out my latest posts over at Crafting a Green World--a round-up of DIY business cards (got to get mine done this week...) and a tutorial for repairing a puzzle by making a handmade puzzle piece.

A Rainy Rainbow Day

Turns out that on a stormy day, an indoor rainbow is just as good as an outdoor rainbow.

Rainbow fruit and veggie kabobs:

Also to eat: rainbow goldfish crackers, leftover rainbow M&Ms, and a rainbow of juices (well, except for the blues--turns out there are no blue juices, so for blue we had Hawaiian Punch, and it was a BIG hit!).

Rainbow reading nook:

Also to do: making rainbow edible bracelets out of Froot Loops and stretchy elastic thread, coloring on a mural wall of butcher paper duct-taped up in the living room, running around in the yard and getting muddy and spraying the hose between rain showers, and all of the  toys in the house. Toys are good.

The masterpiece:

And after:

Thrilling, this cake.

The rainbow party kids:

They were excellent party hosts, polite and generous and grateful and friendly. Well, at the exact end point of the party, when my partner was spraying children's feet mud-free with the garden hose, the older kid did throw mud right in his face, but like we always say, if you're not carried screaming hysterically from a party, then you clearly didn't have any fun.

Oh, and she apologized later.

In other news, one of the nice things about throwing a children's party is the plethora of sensible parents who also attend. As I limped barefoot across the front yard, one mom friend asked me why I was limping. I explained to her that I'd managed to puncture the top of my foot with a stick over at the community garden on Wednesday, and it was still red, sore, and swollen. Immediately, I seemed to be surrounded by a swarm of lecturing mothers, under whose close investigation I do come to wonder, myself, at my situation. I mean, I can't put on my shoe! That's probably not good, now that one comes to think about it.

Therefore, as soon as the party finished, I got on the phone with my insurance's nurse help line (she also lectured me), then bullied on the shoes, got in the car, and after only a brief stop at Vintage Phoenix for Free Comic Book Day, I found myself at the walk-in clinic, with a tetanus shot, an antibiotics prescription, and an order to stay in bed with my foot elevated today.

A day in bed?!? It's like Mother's Day came early this year.

P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, road trips to weird old cemeteries, looming mid-life crisis, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!