dynamic duo

We've filled cold Michigan days with construction using real Lego's (the kind you can't have around babies I tell the boys), tinker toys, and wood blocks, painting w/fingers and brushes, reading and making our own books, watching the birds and squirrels, shoveling snow and building snow structures, making elaborate train tracks, building tents w/the blankets that usually include a heat register, baking and cooking, and anything else we can generate! What is a gem one day, is a flop the next. And what starts out as nothing turns into a two hour adventure.

My guys are generally not cleaners - toys, plates, themselves,... They have grand plans. They build. They create. Cleaning is a detail intended for others (guess who). Cleaning needs to be made part of the project for them to buy into it.

Luckily we paint a lot and luckily (as its one of the messier winter activities) it comes built in w/its own part II.

The other day the boys spent about 1 hour painting. Elijah prefers painting the 3-dimensional. Tobias is content painting ANYTHING. For both it usually evolves into painting their finger nails. As much as they love painting, they LOVE taking the paint tray, brushes, and techno-color body parts to the double kitchen sink. Each gets a sink and continues the activity for close to another hour. (Their fingers were little pink prunes.) Most objects end up clean (enough for me at least - my standards have dropped since having toddlers in the house, have to tell the story sometime about finding kitchen towels in my rag bag that were nicer then the ones we were presently using). They're always disappointed the nail paint has washed off - please don't tell them there is finger nail paint that won't wash off in the bathtub. Mom doesn't have any of that stuff.

Most other projects they want to save to show Dad or keep for using tomorrow. So they can't bear to put away the blocks that are currently a "church" for their race cars. And the farm tractors arranged in a column through the living room must stay because the parade starts tomorrow before breakfast and that doesn't leave enough time for setup. And Dad might need to take the tinker-toy reindeer antlers with him to work tomorrow. What other items are around here...