Turkeys and Troubles

Seeing as how Thanksgiving is only a week away, I decided it was time for Colby and I to do a new project...turkey style.

The first step was to tear the construction paper into pieces to make the grass, sky and clouds. Of course Colby enjoyed that, but it was actually a little harder for him than I expected.

Next, we glued the torn up paper onto the appropriate sections of our "canvas." Here is were I get cheap, or maybe thrifty sounds better. Of course I am not going to use a real canvas for our projects. Instead, I take our empty diaper boxes and break them down and cut them to the size I want. They make for a sturdy surface for our projects, but are also very light weight which makes them possible to hang on the wall with just a little masking tape. Cheap and convenient.

Colby always wants to use my scissors whenever I am cutting anything, so I decided to let him try today. We cut out the yellow sun. Notice the look of concentration. Not an easy task for a 2 year old.

To make the turkeys, I simply painted his palm and thumb with brown paint. Then I painted his fingers in feather colors. Once his hand was goopy with paint, he simply pressed it onto the paper to make a hand print turkey. This, obviously, was the most important part of the project...and it almost didn't happen. He freaked out when I told him that I was going to put paint on his hand instead of the paper. "That's too yucky!!!" I finally convinced him it would be fun by demonstrating on myself and pointing out the fact that the brown paint looked like chocolate.

Once we got going with the hand painting he really loved it. After the paint dried, I went back in with markers and drew little feet, beaks and waddles.

Even though this project took us a long time, he wasn't ready to stop creating. So I turned over the paint brush to him.

Then he insisted he NEEDED to color with the markers. (Something he normally doesn't get to do.)

Then Chloe woke up and project time ended.

So that concludes the turkey part of this post. Now for the trouble portion...

The kids and I were down in the basement playing and checking email. Chloe was on my lap and getting sleepy. When that happens she starts throwing herself around and wrestling and basically doing anything she can to keep herself awake. Well, she had thrown herself backwards and when she sat back up she somehow caught the corner of my laptop with her forehead. It didn't seem like she had hit it that hard, so I couldn't figure out why she was crying so much. A minute later I noticed the nice little lump forming and glowing red on her forehead. So we headed to the kitchen for some ice.

Then tonight we were in Colby's room plugging in a space heater. We wanted to show it to him because it glows and we didn't want him to be scared of it if he woke up in the middle of the night. Well we turned it on, he turned out the light and then immediately tripped over Curt's foot. He broke his fall with his face on the end of the bed frame. We knew it was bad before we even got the lights back on. So we headed to the kitchen for some ice.

So that was our day on Thursday, turkeys and troubles.