Fancy Shamcy

I checked out a kids' craft book from the library last week, with noble aspirations of actually doing something "crafty" with my kids (one of the crafts was a toilet paper roll "tooth fairy"! How cool is that?) Kids LOVE doing crafts.

I am not crafty.

The book sat on our couch for a few days, and today out of desperation to do *something* that might earn me a Mother of the Year award, I pulled out my "craft box" that I use for my Activity Day activities (because *those* girls are crafty), and let the kids have the rare treat of digging through it (it's typically off-limits at the top of my closet). There wasn't anything especially exciting in there: construction paper, scissors, glue sticks and elmer's glue, markers, and glitter. The glitter didn't last very long, so out came the vacuum, and the craft box got moved from the floor in front of my closet to the kitchen table.

Raia started making cards and putting them into envelopes to be mailed out to some of her cousins, although she drew pictures of lambs (with purple polka-dots) where the addresses should go, so I'm not sure if they'll actually ever see the inside of a post office... Errol scribbled on the papers with markers, and went to down with the scissors, making conffetti (although he didn't know that that was what he was making. he was just excited that I wasn't yelling "Put those down!" at the sight of him with scissors).

Then I did something *truely* award-winning, and made colored macaroni. A 3-month-old, half empty bag of elbow macaroni (we're more of a rotini family), a "splash" of rubbing alcohol, and a few drops of food coloring, and 15 minutes later we had three different colors of macaroni to glue onto the construction paper. The kids didn't make any fancy designs out of them, and we're more than likely completely out of Elmer's glue now, but the kids LOVED that macaroni.

Raia even said: "Thank you for the macaroni mom. I LOVE it!"

Maybe tomorrow we'll make that tooth fairy.