A toddler lives here

The photo to the left shows the current state of the message board in our kitchen. That is to say, the messages have taken a back seat to the large number of crafts and colouring pages and other odds and ends that Liam brings home. The colouring page came from Cindy's house, where the topic of the week was hearts (mostly referring to Valentine's Day, but there was also a lesson about maintaining a healthy heart in there somewhere; I guess you're never too young to start). The doily craft on top is something Liam and I made together today at the Early Years Centre. (This is the first time we've gone to the Saturday drop-in session; I felt bad that he hasn't been able to play outside all week on account of the cold, and thought it would be good to get him down there for open gym time so he could blow off some steam. We did the craft while he was catching his second wind.) Underneath the colouring page on the left there's a penguin (penguins also being a recent theme week at Cindy's) and on the right, there is still a construction paper Rudolph from sometime before Christmas. Heck, there is even still a small photo of Liam from last summer, matted on a piece of red cardstock; it's from a Father's Day craft Liam brought home last June: a styrofoam-cup dalmation wearing a fireman's hat and holding his picture with the caption "Happy Father's Day From Your Little Sparky".

It is becoming a chore to keep the clutter from piling up, as this doesn't even scratch the surface of all he comes home with. (Thank goodness for recycling bins!) The photo on the right is another treasure from this week: at Cindy's house the kids made bird feeders, which consist of pie plates filled with water, birdseed and some glitter thrown in for good measure, threaded on a shoelace, frozen, extracted from the pie plate and hung from the tree. We chose the tree right in front of Liam's table in the family room so that he could watch the birds enjoying his handiwork while colouring or playing with Play Doh or eating his breakfast. It took all week, but we finally had a visitor come to the bird feeder. Unfortunately, it wasn't of the feathered variety.