Goggles On

I saw this idea on a few blogs and thought Brady would love it.  I dug through the recycling to find 2 good toilet paper rolls for us to use to make binoculars.  So this morning after we did a few other activities I pull out the toilet paper rolls.  I intended on having him paint them, so at that point they were literally just 2 separate plain brown rolls in my hand.  He sees them and says "oh googles" and takes them and puts them up to his face.  OK, who told him I planned on making them into "goggles" like Team Omizoomi?  Because whoever it was made decorating them painful.  He didn't want to paint them, he just wanted to use them immediately.  Somehow I talked him into painting them and paint he did.  They ended up looking kinda girly but that's his fault because he chose the colors and that included pink and purple.  But he picks pink because its my favorite and reminds me of this fact a minimum of 29 times.

 So while he napped I assembled them and when he got up they were ready to go.  I planned on taking him out for a dinosaur dig using his new dinosaurs and had that all set up and ready to go in the sandbox.  He thought the "goggles" were awesome and couldn't wait to get out there to dig for dinosaurs.  But actually touching the sand to find the dinosaurs was not on his agenda for the day.  He would use the shovel to reveal them and then ask me to get them.  I refused to encourage his anal tendencies and made him pluck the dinos free.

Pointing to a dinosaur for me to come pick out of the sandbox.

"OK, fine I will do it Mom."

Using his goggles to spot the dinosaurs.

He was thrilled to find them and show them to me.

He filled up his bucket and moved onto giving them a tubby.  He was having little conversations again with them which seriously cracks me up.  Today he was asking them if they liked Mickey Mouse and yogurt cookies (he is slightly obsessed with Trader Joe's yogurt cookies shaped like stars).

In the midst of conversation.

And lastly two other crafts we did:
First up was a rainbox made of stars.  This one took a long time to do, just a heads up in case you try it.  First he/we punched out the stars using our fun scrapbooking puncher.  Then I had him sort them by color, this took some time.  I drew the rainbow with markers so he would have a guide to work with.  We started with red and then he got burnt out so we put it aside for the next morning.  This morning I tried again and we could only get 2 colors done before he needed another break from it.  I don't know if it was too hard for him or just not interesting, but we would just stop and come back to it.  He did however love putting the glue down on the lines.  We finally finished and I think its super cute (but honestly, don't I think everything he does is super cute?).

Finished product.

And lastly, we did some marble painting.  Little known fact is that I played marbles growing up.  What do I mean by "played" well I competed in marble shooting competitions, went to weekly practices, traveled all over to show off my skillz.  Jim really enjoys busting my stones about this fact.  I was 3rd in the US at one point.  So if you want or need my autograph, just ask.  Now that you know this onto the craft.  I cut a piece of construction paper to fit in the bottom of my cake pan that has a lid and dropped globs of different colors of paint onto the paper.  He plopped 5 or 6 marbles in the pan and we closed the lid.  He shook and rattled the cake pan to move the marbles around, which in turn painted the paper.  Very cool and he loved it...... it made a lot of noise and didn't make his hands dirty.  The finished product isn't pretty but it is pretty cool looking.  I highly suggest this one and I am sure we will be doing it again really soon.

He was so excited to see the marbles going through the paint piles.

Finished product.