Category: 18 to 24 months

Baby Food Jar Surprises

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Chances are you have plenty of baby food jars to recycle, but before you toss them, try out this neat game.

Fill 3 to 5 clean baby food jars with small toys, making sure to use a variety of materials. I wanted to present Travis with 2 jars that were quiet when shaken and 2 that were loud. For quiet, I used small rubber dinosaurs and cotton balls. For quiet, I chose coins and marbles (Note: I do not advocate using marbles if you have a child who puts things in their mouth. Please use your own discretion!)

Travis fell upon the jars with delight, first wanting to know what was in each, and then helping me find which ones were loud and quiet. We had fun shaking them and deciding which were which for a while. Then he asked me to open them.

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“That’s up to you,” I told him. “Can you see how it opens?” I helped him twist off the lids, and twist them back on again, great practice.

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He was quite busy with the lids for some time while I cleaned up breakfast. A fun and easy start to out morning.

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Sticky Situations Part 3

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Next time your toddler needs a “canvas” for their art, try taping a sheet of sticky contact paper to a window, wall, or the floor. Decorations can include crumpled tissue paper, cotton balls, or anything else that adheres to the contact paper. I’ve seen gorgeous rainbow art done in the this way!

I needed to wrap a gift in tissue paper, so thought Travis might have fun having a tissue paper project of his own to occupy him while I worked, but…

…. I should have subtitled this post “How Not to Entertain Your Toddler While Wrapping a Bridal Shower Gift.”

First, there was the excitement of sticky contact paper on the floor. Travis was very curious to walk across it, but needed my help for big sticky steps off a few times.

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We decided we were going to use his tissue paper to make a garden, so then came the fun of ripping the paper into pieces small enough to crinkle into “flowers.” This activity was delightful, although I had to play defense near the cat food bowls so that little tissue paper pieces didn’t end up in the turkey.

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We needed stems for our flowers, but I was out of green yarn. Luckily there’s nothing wrong with blue stems in a toddler’s magical fairy garden!

So then of course we needed glitter. Travis wasn’t content with a few sprinkles; he dumped on whole canisters of Martha Stewart Crafts glitter. “We need purple!” he insisted, once the green was all over our garden, and I couldn’t say no. He loved dumping the purple and spreading it evenly among his flowers.

At this point we were both covered in glitter and embarked upon clean-up with a lint roller. We had a great time, but needless to say, it’s not exactly the right distraction to keep a toddler busy while you’re wrapping someone else’s present!

Sticky Situations Part 2

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As a follow-up to my Sticky Situations post, I had some foam farm-themed stickers that I thought we be fun to put up on our window. Travis was a huge fan of setting up the farm scene, talking about the cows and sheep, and practicing animal noises as he worked.

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What I didn’t anticipate was the hot afternoon sunlight making it impossible to remove said-stickers from the window!

As always, these little “disasters” can turn into joyful moments. Travis was thrilled to see how difficult the stickers were to remove, and eager to help out with the “tricky ones.” Then I got down to scraping (I used a pie slicer!) and Travis thought it was just the greatest thing.

He wanted to help, so I gave him a paper towel and his safety scissors so he could get in on the action. We cleaned off nearly all of it, except one patch of window that I’ll have to work on in his nap!

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A nice reminder that even “disasters” can lead to fun and games.

Sticky Situations

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Just a simple post this evening. I highly recommend introducing your toddler to stickers early. Peeling them off of sheets and applying them to paper or coloring books is fantastic for fine motor skills, and stickers in favorite designs will delight your little one. To wit, we love truck stickers, rainbow stickers, and shape stickers around here.

I found this neat idea for keeping little hands busy at The Artful Parent. I had my doubts that Travis would be ready for the concept of centering a hole reinforcement sticker over another circular sticker, but to my surprise, he took to it right away!

Talk about good fine motor practice:

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He was very proud of himself every time he applied a reinforcement sticker spot-on.

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In general, I highly recommend Melissa & Doug reusable sticker pads for toddlers. The stickers are easy to peel, great for new images and vocab words (I’m not even sure what some of Travis’s jungle animals are called!), and best of all – reusable.

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Pom Pom Play

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I sometimes forget that the best games for a toddler might involve the simplest things. This game, which I’ve pulled out twice in the past week, is a huge hit and easy for us moms and dads to set up.

Save your next paper towel tube roll and tape it to a door or cabinet. Present your little one with a bag full of large pom poms and let them go to town!

Travis started out dropping the pom poms down the chute, as I expected, and that was fun in and of itself. But his two favorite variations on the game were trying to fill the tube from the bottom up:

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And, stuffing multiple pom poms down the tube at once, while crying out, “So many!” We’d squish them and then see how long it took for the clogged pompoms to get squeezed all the way down the tube so we could start pulling them from the bottom.

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For slightly more intellectual play, I later presented Travis with mini pom poms in a muffin tin. Much to my surprise, he asked for tongs to move them from cup to cup, but when this became frustrating he had no problem using his fingers or a spoon. He clearly had some imaginative game going in his head, because he told me the pom poms were “still warm” and then “perfect temp” and that we had a to wait a few minutes, so I know he was imitating the way he plays with toy food (and also mimicking the things I say at dinner time, haha).

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My favorite moment, though, was when he spied a blue in the green bin – and made sure to place it back with the other blue ones! When we had fun dumping all the pom poms out, (which of course we did multiple times), he would sort them back into the tins by color.

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At long last, the concept of sorting!

Pipe Cleaner Fine Motor Skills

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When Travis sees pipe cleaners, he generally either wants me to bend them into shapes (hearts are a favorite) or into a loop to wear over his arm like a bracelet. So I wondered if he’d care at all when I presented him with this fine motor challenge! Happily, he took right to it.

The idea is self-explanatory from the photos: set your toddler up with pipe cleaners and a colander and let them go to town.

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Travis loved poking the pipe cleaners through the holes, although never quite got the hang of bending one so it could come back through a second hole.

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This game is the kind that’s great to leave out for a day or two. Travis would return to it in between playing with other toys, thread a few pipe cleaners, and then move on again.

All-Natural Finger Paints

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I’ve had these powdered finger paints in my craft cabinet for quite some time, and finally decided it was time to give them a try!

The paints from Wee Can Too are gluten-free, dairy-free, and vegan, and conform to non-toxic standards i.e. they are edible if your child decides to take an experimental lick. This actually isn’t a worry of mine. as Travis just doesn’t put things near his mouth that aren’t food, but it’s nice to know in case a future son or daughter isn’t the same.

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When Travis was still eating jarred baby food, we had lots of fun dolloping spoonfuls on his tray each meal to trace shapes and letters. But we haven’t bought a can of pureed food in months now, and I missed our little mealtime educational exploration, hence why I broke out the edible finger paint at last.

When breakfast was over, I told Travis we weren’t getting up quite yet, and squirted a little of each of 4 colors on his tray.

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In a fully honest product review, the paints are very uneven in texture. The first tube I tried didn’t have enough water and was so thick and gloppy I had to throw it away. On my next try I added much more water, but the paints were too runny, hence not great for tracing. The mixture I achieved with purple came the closest.

Still, you can’t go wrong with some good old-fashioned messy finger painting! Travis liked mixing the colors and making ovals (his favorite shape thus far).

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You’ll definitely smell the turmeric used to color the orange and yellow paints, and it will stain a little (as turmeric is wont to do), but it’s nothing a good scrubbing with soap and water can’t remove.

Overall, I’d use the paints again, especially with a child who seems inclined to eat paint, as they felt very natural and safe.

Ribbons for Toddlers

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I’m finding Travis to be at a tough age for game ideas; he’s too old for many suggested toddler activities, yet too young for those aimed at preschoolers. Luckily, I’m learning I can count him to find a happy medium when presented with a toy or game, as with this ribbon example.

Filling an empty plastic jar with ribbons and streamers is a nice tactile game for younger toddlers – nothing to it! Travis first tried shoving them in all at once:

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But upon realizing that didn’t work, he began more patiently adding one at a time:

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Then of course comes the fun of dumping out.

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But he very quickly tired of the sensory play, and turned to a game we’d recently played at Gymboree: “Filling up” the air on “tires” (inflatable circle shapes) and “wiping the windows” on a “bus” climbing structure.

So he used his finger to “fill up the bottle” singing, “This is the way we fill up the tires,” and then turned the streamers and ribbons into cloths to “wash the bus.” Soon he was running all over the apartment with his ribbons to “fill up the window, fill up the couch, wash the wall, wash the floor” and so on and so forth.

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I love the way he takes games we’ve played and finds a way to make sense of them elsewhere in his world. Even though we as adults know that it makes no sense to “fill up a couch” with air the way you would a tire, he’s grasping  the concept and applying it, and I love watching him at play!

Heart-Stamping Craft

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Travis and I have had fun with stamp painting before; everything from Duplo blocks to  raw potatoes have made an appearance in our amateur crafting!

For this novel take on stamp art, all you need is the leftover tube from a roll of toilet paper. Using your hand, crimp one end of the tube until you’ve made a heart. Then set your little one up with white paper and a shallow dish of red paint.

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I love it when Travis takes a familiar concept and latches onto it immediately, without my having to explain a thing. The moment he saw the dish of red paint with the tube standing upright, he declared, “Dip dip!” which is also what we say when he dines on food with a dipping sauce on the side. He launched right into happily dipping the tube in the paint and pressing down onto the white paper, then back to the paint again, all while talking to himself excitedly.

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I was impressed that he sought out blank portions of the paper for each new stamp of the tube, so that he filled the sheet very evenly without my having to reorient it in front of him. Not every press made a perfect heart, but he picked up on the idea that that’s what we were making.

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Since Travis had enjoyed a visit from Grammy that morning, we decided to make this a gift for her. We added a pipe cleaner heart with glue, and presented it proudly for display on Grammy’s fridge.

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Upcycled Train Toys

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This craft might seem like an odd one for a vegan family, but fret not – no extra eggs were purchased in the making of this train! My (non-vegan) mother-in-law was kind enough to give me an egg carton once she’d used the eggs inside, allowing me to test out this fun idea from Hands On As We Grow.

To set the craft up, I cut the pieces of the egg carton apart, and poked two holes in each with the point of my scissors. I then presented the pieces to Travis, along with a pipe cleaner.

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For all the effort, Travis was less into the “train” than I thought he would be, despite helping me thread a couple of the carton pieces onto the pipe cleaner.

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I thought for sure he’d love to load his little Duplo people into the train for a ride, but he much preferred to fill it with mini pom poms from our craft bin. From there, he seemed unsure what to do with our creation.

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I’ve been fostering his imaginative play lately, and love seeing his inner world come to life as he grows, so I prompted him with the idea of “make believe” from Daniel Tiger. “Let’s make believe the carton is a train!” I suggested. Suddenly he got it, and began chugging it around our living room floor.

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What fun ideas can you think of for re-purposed egg cartons? Please share in comments below!