Fun Craft Project: Toilet-paper Tube People

Even your small toddler has the motor skills to color the pictures of faces, arms and feet in this PDF document. (It doesn't matter if she stays inside the lines or if the construction worker's face is just a purple scribble!) Once this is done, you can cut out the individual parts and help your child tape or glue them to toilet paper tubes to make charming, little people. I advise you to take the "It doesn't have to look realistic and it's okay if the girl on the right has a leg coming out of her head" approach. I wish I could include pictures of the final product when my son made these, but the files are somewhere among the bazillion pics we've taken of him within the last several months.

Coloring is Free

Coloring books are a great, inexpensive way for your young one to release his artistic energy and have fun. What's cheaper than cheap? Why, FREE of course! The internet age has brought us a wealth of free coloring pages that you can print and keep on hand for your child's next session with the ol' crayons. Just Google the term "coloring pages" and see.

Throw in additional keywords to find coloring pages suited to a variety of interests. I want to expose my son to lots of cool science stuff, so I am totally jazzed at what you can find searching for NASA and dinosaurs. My toddler's current favorite TV show is Curious George, and PBS Kids has a site with numerous printable pictures and games.

Magnetic photography

With digital photography having come to dominate the home snapshot market, and memory getting more abundant every year, we take literally thousands of pictures of our baby. We went ahead and bought the 2GB memory stick so we could just snap, snap, snap away without concern. If you take this many pictures of your little tyke, you probably often print a few off for family, friends, and yourself through a service like Snapfish, Shutterfly, Walgreens, Walmart, etc. (I don't want to promote a specific one, though I think my wife usually goes with either Shutterfly, or the online photo service from HyVee: a local grocery chain.) This can lead to piles of photos building up in your house. Where do you put them all? I guess you could use the fridge, but that would lead to a mess of photos half-covered with a motley collection of magnetic fruit and other bric-a-brac, right?

What we've been doing is simply taping bit of magnet directly to the back of the pictures. You don't even have to go out and buy magnetic strips for this (though you can). Just cut up some magnets you've gotten from the bank, your realtor or some old magnetic schedules from a college sports team.

Pictured above: Our freezer door shows its enthusiasm for our photographic hobby.

Easy Diaper Change Pack

I'm very much into simplicity, and the project below greatly simplifies the amount of stuff you have to drag along with you on short trips with your baby.

T-shirt Stencils Using Freezer Paper

This post on the blog Dabbled introduced me to a new technique for making custom T-shirts at home using freezer paper. First, you draw/trace a design onto a piece of freezer paper and cut it out with an Xacto knife.
You then place your stencil on the t-shirt, shiny side down, and iron it on. Use a brush to apply a liberal coat of fabric paint (make sure you dab it into those corners!).

Once the paint is dry, you can peel off the stencil to reveal your masterpiece. With a onesy like this, your baby will endear himself to you even in the growliest of moods!

Start Saving Craft Supplies

Even though our child is still just a baby and hasn't yet developed the requisite motor skills for gluing macaroni to things, my wife and I have thought ahead and started a craft materials collection. Here's a photo of one of several boxes of supplies we're saving for the future creative endeavors of our little Renaissance man:

It's never too early to build a cache of these things, so before you throw something out or recycle it, think about it for a moment in terms of whether something awesome could be made from it. A (very limited) list of such handy items includes:

• Egg cartons
• Coffee cans
• Empty jars (If these are glass jars, you should set them aside in a separate box for items not suitable for younger crafters.)
• Oatmeal cans (These also make great toys for baby. Our boy LOVES his Quaker Oats can!)
• Random swag you get from the bank, your real estate agent, or drug rep family members that you have no practical use for (Calendars, stress-relievers, keychains, who-knows-what-else...)
• and make sure you're saving your toilet paper rolls!

"Yay!"

Home Movies People Will Actually Enjoy

Modern technology has made it so that no one need be subjected to two-hour long video tapes of your child's baseball games, birthday parties, etc. Most consumer digital cameras these days can shoot video, thus eliminating the need for expensive and time-consuming video capture equipment. You can now just drop the videos onto your computer and start editing. I use Windows Movie Maker, which came free with my version of Windows XP. Mac users have a similar tool in the form of iMovie. While these aren't professional video programs, they're surprisingly robust software with which you can do a lot to pep up your home videos, cut a peewee sporting event down to a manageable highlight reel, or isolate just the funniest moment of your baby's first taste of applesauce. And if you're feeling creative, you can even add some special effects, like the fast-motion used in this Valentine's Day card for my wife:

You know, in a few months my baby will actually be moving that fast.