We were out of town this weekend, but I promise to get back on the December Daily bandwagon soon. There’s no shame in finishing this project in January!
Those of you who know me well know that I tend to obsess about my Christmas wrapping paper. In fact, I have been known to take longer picking out the paper than the gifts, a fact which frustrates Michael to no end. This year I thought I would take a different approach though. We want Kate to feel involved in our gift giving this year and our goal is to make Christmas about giving *not* receiving. Not sure how successful we’ll be given the fact that she’s 2 1/2, but we wanted to give it a shot.
Which brings us to the craft du jour, wrapping paper. Michael has a huge roll of white butcher paper which seemed like it would be the perfect canvas for this project. I rolled out enough paper to make an approximately 10′ x 10′ square and taped it to the floor. By the way, that measurement is *totally* made up. I am terrible at gestimating stuff like that. 🙂
Then I let Kate pick out some paint from my scrap stash. Probably should have used the crayola washable stuff, but I wanted to give her some more choices. She went with pink. 🙂 When I first plopped her down with the paint (in her apron and diaper) she asked me for a paint brush. When I told her we weren’t using brushes today, but just to walk through the paint and make footprints on the paper she looked at me like I had 3 heads, but eventually she conceded and gave it a try.
Once she got past her aversion to getting messy, she was all over it. She enjoyed doing handprints as well. She wanted to stick her whole face in the paint at one point, but I put my foot down.
We ran out of pink at one point, but we were still having fun so I got out some green paint. Ah, pink and green. My favorite color combo. 🙂
I will say that I was very worried before we started that she and Ninja (out toy poodle) would get paint all over the floor but they were both great. Kate did forget and step off the paper a few times, but I just wiped it right up with a wipe. Might want to do this outside if you have carpet.
Kate definitely needed a bath afterwards, but we had a blast. She turned to me while I was cleaning up and said, “Mama, I’m happy.” ::melt:: Me too, honey, me too. Now I just need to design some tags and we’ll be all set.