Keeping My Toddler Busy

 Last week my mom found a lifesaving book for me at a thrift store called "The Toddler's Busy Book" with 365 creative games and activities to keep your 1 1/2-to 3-year old busy. I repeat, a life saving book. 

 Some of the activities I wanted to do required a trip to the craft store where we stocked up on supplies. So far this week here are two of the things I've made for S. to keep him busy. 

The Wave Bottle 

All you do is take an empty soda bottle (I used a small 8 oz coke bottle) and fill it 1/3 of the way full of water. Then put in food coloring if you want. I made ours blue, but it's hard to tell because of the massive amounts of glitter I put in which is the next step. Putting in whatever fun things you want into it. I put in glitter, sequins, dimes, nickels. A lego man would have been fun if I'd had one. Then you fill the rest of the bottle with baby oil . Glue the cap on and viola! you've got a fun bottle for your kid to shake and watch all the glittery waves and things float around. Sawyer has played with it a few times, but hey my brothers friend Mike played with it for 15 minutes! So there you go, it can be fun for babies and grown ups. 

Next we made some texture magnets out of canning lids. We glued magnets onto the back of the lids with a glue gun and fun things on the front for S. to touch. The first one is just gold ribbon, second is sparkly pom poms, the third is an assortment of noodles, next is a soft piece of fleece, and the last is a yarn pom pom.

Then Matt and I got on a roll and really started getting creative! I constructed a spider out of the pom poms and black pipe cleaners and Matt made some dinosaur murals on his out of pom poms and dino stickers we found. 

Here S. is not quite sure what to make of the spider magnet. He may have inherited an arachnophobia from me!

And while I'm blogging about good books to keep your kid busy I have to talk about this awesome find. I saw it in the airport at Thanksgiving and knew Sawyer would LOVE it, but wasn't willing at that time to spend almost $20 for it.  Lucky for us Matt likes to search on line for the best deals around and he found it for him on Amazon for a whole lot cheaper.

It has the cutest photos of all different breeds of dogs and is written by Matthew Van Fleet. I've seen it at Borders recently too.

Not only is Sawyer obsessed with dogs which was one reason I knew he'd like it, but he also enjoys books that you can touch and feel. Almost all the pages have either flaps to lift up or pull and different textures to feel. In the photo below you can feel the white dogs pony tail, the sheep dogs fur and lift up the flaps of the last dogs ears.

Finally there's a book that he will actually look through the whole thing and let me read it to him, instead of jumping off my lap after the first two pages. We have a winner!