Valentines & Crafting With Toddlers

Happy Valentines Day!

I hope you are having a love-ly valentines day. ;) Yesterday morning Mason slept in, so while he was snoozing Gavin and I made him a valentine (and other random works of art). Crafting with Gavin is something I really should do more often because, as I discovered yesterday morning, he loves it. It held his two-year-old attention span for almost 2 hours straight!

It was a total blast doing this with him. I put his little table and chair set into the middle of his bedroom floor. I let him pick out a few different coloured pieces of fun foam and colourful paper from my stash and I brought in a ton of stickers, some school glue, and some markers that were hiding away in the corners of my craft supply cabinet. The first funny thing I learned was that this child loves glue! He could just sit around all day and glob glue all over everything.

The second thing I learned was that crafting with toddlers takes a lot of self control on my behalf. Why? Because it is just going to be a big mess and there is nothing you can do about it. If you try to keep your play area perfectly clean while a little person crafts, then you are going to ruin their fun and interfere with their creativity. I made sure I didn't let him have more than one marker at once and I didn't let him run totally amuck with the glue, but other than that I let him make a big mess and have fun. All it took was some soap and water to clean up, no big deal!

{ This is the finished valentine Gavin made. All I did was cut out hearts & placed the stickers :) }