BEST ACTIVITY EVER

I often think Johnnie is bored at home. At her Gramma's house, there are all sorts of age-appropriate toys and books to occupy her time -- not to mention playmates her age to dance and giggle with all day long. That's one of the many perks of having a grandmother who babysits kids in her home. At our house, the options are much more limited. By choice, we haven't collected many toys since we don't spend many playtime hours at home. It only makes sense that eventually, what options we do have will get a little played out. Lately I've been putting more thought into new activities and toys we can add to the mix. I don't want to spend a lot while accumulating tons of things she'll quickly outgrow, so the creative juices have been flowing over here.

Enter the fascinating world of dried beans. Since Ez and I teach the preschool Sunday School class at our church, we often have random stuff lying around like pipe cleaners, popsicle sticks and -- you guessed it -- giant bags of dried beans. (You know, for making musical instruments and whatnot...) One evening after work last week, I dumped some of the beans in a basket, gave her a firm lecture on never ever ever putting them in her mouth, and handed her some bowls and spoons to dig around with. This is obviously not an earth-shattering original idea, but we played in that basket together for a solid hour and a half -- scooping, pouring, dumping, stirring -- and she cried when it was time to go to bed because she wasn't ready to quit. Success!

(Note: She has never been one to put things in her mouth, but obviously this is not an activity that I would ever let her do with my back turned even for a second. Even when she just pretended to taste some bean soup we were stirring in her bowl, I was all over her. So this is basically a 110% supervised activity.)

A few days later her interest is starting to wane a bit, but I'm pretty thrilled anyway. For an investment of zero dollars, she got to try something new and work on her manual dexterity at the same time -- and we had several evenings of a happily occupied kid. In a few weeks I'll get them out again and see if her interest piques again. Until then, I'm having fun trying to think of new free-or-almost-free adventures we can have to keep her engaged during those relatively short but precious hours we're just hanging around at home.

Next up: homemade Play-Doh. This picture is several weeks old now, but this is basically the face she made when I told her. Kid loves her some Play-Doh.

Parenting is fun. And if you have any fun toddler activity recommendations, please let me know!