Craft Challenged

I realized yesterday morning that Jacob needed some valentines to take to his preschool party today. I didn’t want to buy a box of lame grocery store valentines when he only needed two, so I decided we would make some. Besides, I like homemade crafty things, they are free, which is my main reason for making stuff myself, and it is a fun activity to do with the kids. So I found a cute and seemingly easy idea on familyfun.com. The idea was to use a heart shaped carrot stamp (just like a potato stamp, but made with a carrot) to make a caterpillar using acrylic paint. Someone left a comment on the site saying their three year old really liked this project. I thought if a three year old could do it then for sure my kids could do it, I mean, how hard can stamping be? I realized as we set about stamping with our heart shaped carrots that I thought wrong. First of all, what was I thinking using acrylic paint, I already know Jacob can’t be trusted with acrylic paint. He has ruined one too many t-shirts and a pair of pants by wiping paint off his fingers onto his cloths. I gave him a paper towel and kept reminding him not to wipe his hands on his cloths. I think we avoided paint stains this time. We did, however, get paint all over the kitchen counter. Nathan didn’t get the whole stamping concept, he just wanted to smear paint on his cards with his carrot. He also didn’t get the whole stamp in a chain to make a caterpillar concept, some of his finished product have random blotches of paint. Unfortunately the heart stamps I spent a whole 5 minutes making didn’t look like hearts when my kids stamped them on their paper (I tried it and it worked, so it was their technique, not my homemade stamps). And to top it all off, Jacob got tired of the project after three cards, so I am sorry to any cousins who didn’t get a valentine from us this year. This isn’t the first time I have overestimated my kids ability to do a craft project, and I am sure it won’t be the last. I wonder if we did more projects if they would get better, of if they really are just craft challenged.

With the finished product, they turned out cute in the end. I guess we will do it again.