I absolutely love doing craft projects. My favorite craft is
knitting and that’s where I invest most of my craft time and where I have
developed the most skill. But I have dabbled in scrapbooking, small quilting
projects, beaded jewelry and other crafts over the years. I’m the kind of
person who happily walks the aisles of A.C. Moore or Michael’s or JoAnn’s
looking at all the potential projects and dreaming of having infinite time and
money to spend on crafts. There is just such a rush when I am able to create
something beautiful, particularly if it is also useful. For me, one of the
exciting aspects of having a child was the prospect of doing kid crafts again.
I have been waiting, more or less patiently, since my daughter was born for her
to be capable of doing craft projects with me. Tonight I took the plunge and we
had our first mother daughter craft night.
There were several things that inspired me to move ahead
with doing craft projects. Lately my daughter has been into painting with
watercolors, which she does during the day with my husband. She’s having a
blast with that, according to him, and I’ve been fairly jealous. Although some
of the jealousy was soothed by being the recipient of a new masterpiece for my
wall at work. Several friends have told me about projects with their kids that
went well which was encouraging. Finally, my daughter lost her magic wand. As I have
mentioned before, her favorite Sesame Street character is Abby, a young fairy
godmother in training who uses a wand to “twinkle think.” My daughter had a
pumpkin flashlight that she had designated as a wand and which she would put to
her temple and announce “I need to twinkle think.” Sadly, pumpkin wand has gone
missing sometime over the past week, apparently lost somewhere in the no mans
land between the house the playground and daycare. It has been missed by my
daughter several times, and although we’ve been able to distract her I wanted
to obtain a replacement wand before we have the total meltdown.
My initial thought was that I would cut out a wand shape
(stick with a star) from cardboard and cover it with aluminum foil for her.
However, I realized I didn’t have any boxes around that I was willing to cut
up. I also thought it would be more fun to make a wand with my daughter. So off
to Michael’s we went. I found a package of popsicle sticks and another package
of cut out wood shapes – stars and hearts and diamonds. I found glitter glue
and gem stickers and foam stickers and we were in business. Tonight after
dinner I put down the large plastic tablecloth we use for messy activities,
brought out the art supplies, and we went at it for 45 minutes before bedtime.
I think between us we decorated about 10 wands and most importantly we had fun.
As an adult, I’ve learned I need to hold myself in check
when doing activities with my two and a half year old daughter. It’s hard
sometimes because I have distinct ideas about how things should be done. I have
to sit on and squelch the part of me that wants things done “right.” Yes, my
toddler squeezes the glitter glue in big clumps all over the wands so that it
won’t dry. Yes, she peels the stickers off and sticks them on until they lose
their stickiness. Yes, we have to negotiate sharing the glitter glue and gem
stickers. Yes, she has more fun sticking the stickers on her own hands (and
mine) than on the wands. Yes, she makes a huge mess. And that’s all okay.
I remind myself of several things. Everything washes; kid,
clothes, floor, tablecloth and Mommy. I’ve learned to only buy washable craft
supplies. Messes can be fun sometimes if you aren’t tense about them. Sharing
with Mommy is good practice for sharing with other people. It’s arts and
crafts, so there really isn’t any such thing as “right” anyhow. It’s not
necessary or even important to have a beautifully decorated magic wand. (Although,
I confess, I did make a few wands that I thought looked nice because I played
with the art supplies a little on my own last night. My reasoning was that I
would pre-glue some shapes and also get a feel for how the glitter pens worked.
Uh-huh. Yep. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.)
The most important thing this evening is that we had great time together, so that this
will be the first of many mother daughter craft nights. The most important thing is that we will have great memories of doing something really fun together. So this evening I sat back, played
with glitter glue (the best part of the supplies in both of our opinions) and
made art with my two and a half year old daughter. That's the real magic in my book.
No comments:
Post a Comment