Wyatt has been asking for a paper wallet like his dad’s for a while now, so I decided to just whip one out for him. He chose red paper of course and when he finished he immediately filled it with discarded cards from his dad’s wallet.

He’s pretty thrilled with it. He keeps asking to go to the grocery store (or “the grocer’s” as he says) because he wants to pay for everything with the “money” in his new wallet. The check-out ladies are really nice about it and “scan” his card each time and he’s so proud. It’s all very cute.

I wish I could knit anything besides one skein hats, because if I could I would knit this in a heartbeat.

Is this not the best sweater you’ve EVER seen??

I’ve found that as Wyatt gets older, the toys he plays with have more and more parts and pieces to them. We were doing a pretty good job of keeping them off the floor by throwing them in baskets and bins, but I found that when they got mixed up, Wyatt had a hard time pulling all the parts of a particular set together and he would get frustrated looking for missing pieces.

I was looking for a way to help him pick up his toys and keep them sorted on his own so I decided to try putting picture labels on his toy bins. The first thing I did was dump all of his toys on the floor and sort them out into different bins. I came up with several broad categories:

• trains and train tracks
• train set “destinations”
• play food and kitchen stuff
• stuffed animals
• plastic animals and safari toys
• vehicles
• construction toys and tools

Next, I photographed a few toys from each of the bins. I took two photos of the toys from each category with different toys in each. I wanted to give Wyatt lots of clues about what went where. Then I printed the photos out and glued one to each side of a piece of chipboard. Wyatt helped me punch a hole in each one and then I tied the tags to the handles of the bins.

The next step was to teach Wyatt how to use the new system. As I was working on the project, I explained the idea behind it to him and then when I had the bins all finished, I pulled some toys out of each bin and mixed them in a pile on the floor. I told him we were playing a “game” and handed him each toy one at a time and asked him where it went. He had a couple of false starts at first, but he quickly got the idea of the “game” and started putting the toys in the correct places all on his own.

I didn’t have very high expectations about how long this whole sorting thing would last, but I have to say that I’ve been pleasantly surprised. Wyatt still isn’t putting his toys away on his own, but he’s a lot better about keeping them all together and we have fewer missing pieces floating around the house. I think it’s also been a help to Zach and I, prompting us to keep the toys more organized.

Over the past month, I’ve embarked on a couple of craft projects to spruce up Wyatt’s room and keep it a little bit better organized. We’ve got a few really nicely framed cowboy prints that Aunt Erin and Uncle Bon-Bon gave him on one wall of his room, but the other walls are a bit bare. I want Wyatt’s room to be a cheerful place that he likes to play in, so I decided to make this flag garland to hang on one of the bare walls.

It was very simple. First, I cut a nice long piece of string. I didn’t measure it, I just eyeballed it. Next, I cut a bunch of flags out of scrapbook paper. I wanted red so the garland would be bright and match the rest of his room, so I just pulled a bunch of sheets with red in them. Next I cut the individual flags. You can probably figure out how to do this on your own, but if you can’t quite get it, Rookie Moms has a basic tutorial here. Once I had all the flags cut, I folded the flap over, applied glue and then glued the sheets over the string.

Here are a couple of close-ups of the flags:

And here it is hanging up in Wyatt’s room. We made a pink garland too because Wyatt decided he liked pink better than the red, so now we have one of each!

Zach and I have been getting kind of sick of the Brault Limonade poster we have hanging over our couch and we’ve been trying to think of something new to do with the space. Since we take so many photos, we’ve decided to hang a bunch of pictures up in a big grouping. We want to intersperse other decorative pieces in with the photos too, so we’ve been taking our time sorting through photos and looking around the house for pieces of art to hang up. I also wanted to make a few things that I can switch out when the seasons change or around the holidays to make our house feel festive.

A few months ago, Ali Edwards showed this butterfly collage over on her blog and it must have stuck pretty firmly in my brain because as I was thinking up something springy to make the other day, I found myself almost exactly duplicating it. I punched the butterflies out of paper from the Wild Saffron line from K&Co and mounted them on dark brown paper. The dark brown wasn’t the best choice I’ve ever made since I was putting the piece in a black frame, but I’ve decided I don’t actually care that much. I really like how this came out, actually. I think it looks like one of those old-timey specimen trays with real butterflies mounted inside. I mean, it’s obvious that these are paper, but it has the same sort of feel.

Anyway, we haven’t finished putting our big photo grouping together, but when we do this will be included. And I’ll be sure to post some photos when the new art is up on the wall.

It has been raining, raining, raining here for the past week. There hasn’t been a lot of opportunities for outside play, or even active play, so Wyatt is starting to go a little stir crazy. This morning, we both woke up in a bad mood and with a whole day of being cooped up in the house stretching before us, I knew that I had to try to come up with an activity or two to keep my little buddy busy.

Wyatt said he was interested in doing some art, so I got online and found a project idea for us to try. The project was set up for an adult to do most of the work and that didn’t seem like it would be very much for Wyatt so we modified it a little.

I cut out the picture and traced Wyatt’s hands and cut them out, but I let him do all the rest of the cutting and gluing. He also picked out all the letters to put on the leaf. I was a bit surprised to see how close he got to getting all the letters in his name by himself. I only needed to prompt him to pick the “Y” off the sticker sheet.

It still ended up being as much my project as Wyatt’s but we had fun.

Now, I just need to come up with something else to fill the rest of the hours of this day…..