Gratitude for

Sleeping in

Birthdays to celebrate

Non-picky eaters in this non-cooking season

Ok, maybe they’re all non-cooking seasons (maybe)

Playgrounds, outdoors and in

Light …

I have been intrigued by the light tables I see on Pinterest (go look)  and around on different blogs . I found some great tutorials (see one at Teach Preschool here) on how to build a light box with a plastic storage container, but knew if I made one that way, I’d never leave it out in our home to be played with. So I thought about what we might have around the house to “hack”.

My husband and I upcycled a forlorn piano bench into a light table for Flora and Bear. We sold the beautiful but not very playable piano years ago, and the buyer discreetly left the bench behind a bush in our yard. Ha!

We: removed the lid and cut a rectangle out of it, spray painted it, then attached a piece of plexi with a sheet of tracing paper over the back to diffuse the light. Next we cut a hole in one side for the cord, and arranged a couple strings of led lights inside the bench. Easier said than done, since we own approximately 4 power tools, and two are sanders. One is the wrong sort of saw for this kind of thing.

Anyhow, it worked out great:

So far, we’ve played with water beads (no pics), animals, and these glass pebbles with some small jewelry containers to sort them.

They are really into the pebbles-sorting, pouring, admiring. They didn’t even eat any, that I know of.  It’s one of the few activities they’ve worked together on … and that is still fun to do even though we’re pretty much stuck inside so we don’t melt into human puddles in this heat.

Well, one day they worked together to bake a cake, too:

And, yeah, that’s a new haircut. The cute-but-it-was-still-sad result of moving during a “trim”. Oh, dear.

No pictures of: how I’m spending the summer and all our cash at the dentist. Fun stuff.

Pictures coming soon of: how we went to the park after dark and I rode the pseudo-merry-go-round with the kids, resulting in the comment “Mom, I’ve never seen you this happy!”  Maybe we ought to get a merry go round.