We're Crafty!

When it was decided that I'd be a SAHM back in 2008, I had such grand plans of daily cooking, craft time, dress up box, etc. Enter real life and the reality that I am not Martha Stewart.

But that doesn't mean we're not getting creative over here. Each week at the library's story time there's a craft. At first, it was a huge pain because Nigel hadn't yet used scissors and wasn't really into coloring for more than 5 seconds. Add to that the fact that Nigel uses both his left and right hands equally well and you have the perfect frustration storm. (I also had a pretty traumatic experience trying to teach a kindergartner how to use scissors a few years ago when I was a volunteer tutor.) But then I remembered I had bought this craft kit on sale after Christmas. We've been practicing cutting with the scissors (first with Play-doh and then paper), and Nigel's really doing well. The kit also came with some plastic tweezers that he can use to pick up small pom poms. The entire thing was designed by an occupational therapist, which is pretty cool. Nigel recently made this sunshine at the library (we finished decorating the sunshine at home; I also actually did most of the cutting on this one since it was a lot of tiny cuts).

We've also been working on drawing people and coloring. I just have this totally irrational fear that he'll get kicked out of preschool this fall because of his lack of artistic abilities (read: my inability to teach him how to color). True story: a friend told me her kids' preschool teacher once said she was concerned because her child wasn't drawing people with necks! But back to Nigel: He's slowly starting to color inside the lines. Last week something really cool happened. We were driving downtown to pick Tim up from work when Nigel said he wanted to draw a picture for Daddy on his little drawing board. I said, OK, well, why don't you draw a face then? And then I told him, first you have a head, which is a circle; then you need two eyes, etc. This is the same conversation we have almost daily when he wants to draw, but this time he drew something that really does resemble a face. Yay developmental milestone!!!!