One thing about being a stay-at-home parent is that
creativity is seemingly a must. After all, it's only a matter of time before
one's toddler says those dreaded words, "I'm bored." While Ellie has
yet to utter those words, she has said something similar on occasion.
"Daddy, I want to do something fun."
Yes, I admit that sentence is pretty much a synonym for
"I'm bored." I'm relatively certain it's Ellie's way of telling me
that it's time for me to entertain her or else she will begin to entertain
herself.
Truth be told, Ellie is decent at entertaining herself.
However, it generally results in the willful destruction of our home. Toys
strewn everywhere. Pots and pans emptied from the cabinets. I've even been
known to find our spare dish brush in various locations around the house from
where Ellie went on a "cleaning" binge.
As I still find myself in recovery mode from my surgery a
couple of weeks ago, I've had to draw upon creativity to keep Ellie and myself
out of trouble. Obviously, I still can't wrestle with Ellie. It's also been
hard to do some of our normal activities like hide-and-seek as it's really hard
for me to get down onto the floor. One thing that we can do though is get
crafty.
With the Christmas season rapidly approaching, Ellie and I
decided that a little craft project was in order. Well, actually I decided that.
Ellie was just happy to go along with whatever. What exactly was our craft
project? Making Christmas ornaments!
There are plenty of avenues one can pursue when making homemade Christmas
ornaments. If you need proof, just check out Google and you can look forever.
For us, we settled on the fairly simple method of combining glass balls,
crayons, and a blow dryer.
The first step was arguably the most painstaking and time
consuming. What was that first step? The removal of the paper from the outside
of the crayons. Seriously, it took forever. That could have been due in part to
me stupidly breaking them into smaller pieces before removing the paper but who
knows.
Once the paper was off and the crayons were broken into tiny
pieces, I placed them inside a zip-lock bag and used our rolling pin to further
break up the pieces. Once that step was done, Ellie and I could start our
activity.
As I carefully removed the top from the ornament, Ellie
would pick out some crayon pieces of her choosing and place them inside the
ball. I'd then reassemble the ornament and move onto the next step. Using
Bethany's hair dryer, with the assistance of Ellie, we heated up the ornament,
turning it continually so that the crayon wax could run all over the inside of
the ball.
Like any other new activity, there was definitely a learning
curve to making the ornaments. It didn't take long to realize that three colors
of crayon were too many and we needed to stick to two. It also didn't take me
long to realize that heated glass is really hot. Therefore, I had to find a
garden glove and a pair of pliers to help me turn the ornament.
Lastly, I had to teach Ellie that there are certain color
combinations that don't look good together. Despite her preference, brown
really failed to mesh well with any other color used in this project.
 |
| Yes, that is Ellie's precious brown ornament in the bottom right-hand corner. |
If anyone else out there is looking for a fun winter-time
project to keep their kids busy with, I'd definitely recommend this one. After
all, the entry price point of about $4.00 really isn't too bad for the amount
of fun Ellie and I had doing this together. #DaddyWrite
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