Snowman Inside

Last week while I was trying to coach basketball, my sweet little monster insisted on throwing the basketball at his 3-month old little sister. After hitting her in the face for the third time in a row, resulting in her screaming and me wanting to string him up to the nearest basket, I dragged him out to the car and took several long, deep breaths. When I went back to the gym (no I didn't leave him in the car, but believe me I wanted to) I spent a few minutes shooting baskets with "just him" before I went back to practicing with the girls. I wish I could say that tamed the monster and he was perfect the rest of the day, but it didn't. The one-on-one play time did help a little though and I resolved to squeeze in a little more one-on-one time with him at home to help ease the "give me attention" moments we have when I am distracted. I decided art was a great thing for us to do together and this is the first project we did as part of my resolve! It was too cold to take my baby out to play in the snow, so we built a snowman inside instead.

We started by tearing scrap pieces of white paper into little pieces...what three-year-old doesn't like destroying things? Then I drew three circles on a piece of construction paper as a guide, grabbed the glue, and let my son build his snowman!I simply put a whole bunch of glue in the circles and let him place the paper at his own will. To make sure the glue didn't dry up while he was placing his paper, we did one circle at a time. After the base of the snowman was built, we added the accessories: a hat, eyes, a carrot nose, a mouth, and some arms. I put the dots of glue down and he placed the pieces, but if you wanted a more Picasso-like snowman or if you have older kids, they could do this part themselves. We also added a few snowflakes made from a paper punch. You could also add a scarf, shoes, jewelry, etc. The sky's the limit...or at least your child's attention span is. My Zach doesn't have great fine motor skills, so this was a great activity to help him use his fingers...though it did cause for some frustration at times. In the end though, we had a snowman that anyone would be proud of...and I had a little boy who was happy having a fun "Zach-only" project!