living in a sea of crayons and glue sticks

Things are nutty around here. That baby is 10 months old now and into everything. The girls had to move their entire paper doll stash from the floor, to the small table, to the big table all in about 10 minutes yesterday after the baby doggy was tearing them to shreds. We moved onto other activities, this one being a favorite—it's called Shopping List.

Here's the 3.5 year old version. It involves the morning newspaper paper, glue sticks, scissors and paper. What's awesome is they take these with us when we go grocery shopping. I had all these big plans this week to try some projects from this lovely new book you surely are all familiar with—

The Creative Family: How to Encourage Imagination and Nurture Family Connections, by Amanda Blake Soule, but life got the better of us. But, I have been able to put Amanda's wonderful ideas into good use around here in the form of making it easier for all of us to make a mess. This means changing around tables, making it easier for the girls to get out their own supplies and facilitating a quicker clean-up, which is the real clincher. We live in a small house and there is a lot of bumping and tripping on chairs, crayons, and papers, and it can make me crazy. My parenting style is following the path of least resistance, so if it's hard for me to set up the girls to get crafty—things need to be organized differently. If I'm thinking "if I trip over that flippin chair one more time, I'm gonna chuck it outside"—yeah, that's a clue it's time to rearrange the furniture.

Amanda has this brilliant setup in her book with this huge table next to an armoire with all her family's craft supplies tucked inside, and it has doors. Thank god for doors. Two of the projects/ideas I want to try first in her book are the henna tattoos and providing photo albums for the girls and letting them have at it with the camera. I can't believe they don't have their very own photo albums yet, I think this is such a great idea. This book is full of ideas like these— very, very cool.

In my constant attempt to keep the girls involved in decisions about their creative areas, I did have them help me rearrange the coloring station and put their names on boxes so there are fewer coloring book infringements (middle child running amok) and because they helped with it, they seem more interested in taking care of the area. They also insisted that the boxes have not only their names, but princess stickers adoring them, of the Disney variety. Not my first choice on the lovely unfinished wood Ikea boxes, but hey, whatever works, man.

Congrats Amanda! I wish I could bring you a cake. No, make that pie!! Your book is wonderful.