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.

We are having a beautiful day here today. After weeks of rain storms, the sun is shining and it’s in the 50’s. I think this is the first time the pavement has been dry since we got back from Iowa. You can probably imagine how torturous ten solid days of rain are for a three-year-old. Wyatt doesn’t do very well on days when he doesn’t go out to play. So as soon as we figured out the weather was going to be nice today we stepped out the door. Wyatt got a new bottle of bubbles as a potty training prize and he’s been itching to play with them, so we broke those open.

He likes to catch the bubbles on the wand and then pop them with his finger.

After we played with the normal bubble wand for a while, I got inspired to try some fancier bubble techniques. I went to the kitchen and gathered some supplies: a pie plate, a couple of holey spatulas and a plastic sieve (normally used as a sand toy). We poured the bubble juice into the pie plate and then dunked each of the objects in the bubble juice and started blowing.

The snowflake spatula was cool because it made big bubbles that clung together and lots of little bubbles too.

The sieve was awesome because it made giant clumpy bubbles like this one:

This was a fun experiment for both of us. We’ll definitely try this again. Next time, I think I’ll get Wyatt in on it a little more and see if he can come up with ideas for objects to dip in the liquid.

OK, so now I get to write the embarrassing follow-up post about bean dirt. Remember how I talked about what a great idea I had? Remember my slightly gloating tone because I thought I was so clever? Well, I’m here today to eat a little crow, internet.

Yesterday morning, Wyatt wanted to play with the beans first thing when we got up. I dumped them out onto a cookie sheet, retrieved his matchbox cars and set about filling the kettle and putting it on for tea while he started to play. I had just turned on the stove when Wyatt came up to me with his finger up his nose. “Mama! My booger hurts!” he said.

I got a Kleenex and told him to blow.

“It hurts, Mama! This booger hurts!”

Hmmmmm…unusual. I didn’t remember him ever telling me a booger hurt before. On a hunch, I asked him to tilt his head back and looked up his nose. He did indeed have a strange-looking booger in his right nostril.

And then I realized it wasn’t a booger.

“Wyatt, did you put a bean up your nose?” I asked.

He nodded. “Yep!”

Fantastic. He had a dried garbanzo bean up his nose. The whole time we were playing with bean dirt, I was thinking it was safe for an almost-three-year-old because he doesn’t put things in his mouth any more. It didn’t even cross my mind that he’d stick one of the beans up his nose.

So then we got Zach up and called our pediatrician’s answering service to find out what to do. When Dr. Kittams called back, he suggested that we first try to get Wyatt to blow it out of his nose by pressing on the empty nostril and blowing out his nose as hard as he could. He gamely tried to do that a few times, but you know…he’s three…and blowing out through his nose isn’t something he’s completely mastered. Sometimes when he “blows his nose” he blows out and sometimes he sucks air in. And after three or four unsuccessful tries of anything Wyatt starts whining and saying, “I can’t, I can’t!” and punctuating his statement with random screams and wails.

Next, Dr. Kittams said we should take a paper clip, straighten it out and bend the top quarter inch at a 90 degree angle. Then he told us to sterilize it with a bit of rubbing alcohol, hold Wyatt very, very still and then ease the paper clip into his nose and flick the bean out with the bent tip. I had my doubts about this one, but Wyatt really didn’t want to go into the doctor’s office so I thought we could give it a try. As soon as he saw the bent paper clip, that idea went right out the window. “What’s that?” he asked.

“It’s a tool to get the bean out of your nose,” I said.

“Nooooooooooo!” he screamed and took off running around the house.

We tried to convince him to let us get the bean out a few more times, and then we called the pediatrician to tell him we needed to come in. There was absolutely no way I was going to stick a paper clip up my screaming, flailing toddler’s nose.

When we did finally get to the pediatrician’s office, he brought two interns into the office with him to watch the procedure. He said objects up the nose are pretty common, but he hadn’t seen one for a couple of years so he wanted them to see it. Wyatt was pretty terrified by it all and wasn’t capable of sitting still for the doctor so I held him on my lap, Zach held his arms and one of the interns held his feet and Dr. Kittams used an official medical instrument that looked like a bent paper clip to flick the bean out of his nose.

After three hours in Wyatt’s nostril, the bean had absorbed enough moisture that it doubled in size. The bean on the right is the actual bean. The one on the left is included to show the starting size.

So, Wyatt is fine, the bean is out of his nose and he’s promised not to put anything up there ever again. We are going to let him keep playing with the bean dirt because we’re pretty certain that he’s learned his lesson. This morning when I dropped him off at day care he told me, “Mama I was really good this morning. I didn’t put a bean up my nose!” I plan to frequently remind him not to shove stuff up his nose going forward too.

One thing that has made me feel better about all this is hearing how common this sort of thing is. Whenever I repeat this story, the person I’m talking to always has their own tale of someone she knows — her kid, his neighbor, her nephew, himself — sticking an object in one of the holes in her head. In descending order from most popular to least these are the objects I’ve heard have gone up noses, in ears and down the throat:

• beans (3, all up the nose)
• pennies (2, one up the nose, one swallowed)
• popcorn (2, one up the nose, one in the ear)
• bead (1, up the nose)
• jagged metal thing (1, swallowed and by far the scariest story)
• Barbie doll shoe (1, up the nose)
• raisins (1, multiple raisins packed into a nostril)
• Sweet-tart (1, up the nose of my dear brother, Lance)

Fascinating.

Note: Please be sure to read my follow-up post Bean Dirt, Part 2 wherein young Wyatt shoves one of the beans I discuss here up his nose. 

The other day, Wyatt and I went outside to play with his matchbox cars in the abandoned flower bed in front of our house. We had a great time digging holes and pushing dirt around. Such a great time, in fact, that when he woke up the next morning, Wyatt wanted to go out to the flower bed again first thing. I wasn’t up for perching on a stepping stone in the middle of a pile of dirt with no caffeine at 7:15 a.m. so I told him no.

Then, just as the whining was starting, I had a great idea (if I do say so myself). I pulled a cookie sheet out of the cupboard and dumped a couple of half bags of dried beans into it. (Let’s face it — we’re never actually going to soak them and cook them. They’ve been in the cupboard since we moved into this place…) I put a dump truck and a bulldozer in the tray along with a couple of other little vehicles and Wyatt immediately got the concept of the “bean dirt”.

We had a great time playing with the beans. Some of the things we did: filled and dumped the dump truck, made roads, made mountains, and buried the ambulance. We also had fun just running our hands through the beans and pouring them over each other’s hands.

This kept Wyatt occupied for hours. When I came home from work at the end of the day, Zach told me that he’d only put the beans away a little while before and the only reason he’d done that was because he’d started dropping beans down the heat registers. Even now, several days later, this is the activity of choice. It’s a wonderful option to pull out now that the rain is starting up again.

Note: Please be sure to read my follow-up post Bean Dirt, Part 2 wherein young Wyatt shoves one of the beans I discuss here up his nose.

Before our trip to the OC, I was pretty nervous about how Wyatt would handle Disneyland. I was concerned that it would be overwhelming for him, but I was also nervous about how he would handle waiting in line for rides. So one day when I was looking at the piles of scrapbooking stuff all over my desk, I got the idea to make him a special distraction book that I could pull out to keep him occupied while we were waiting.

I started off with one of the cheap, $1 Target albums I keep around. The cover was already pretty good, so I just personalized it a bit by adding a “W” sticker it.

Next, I went through our photo archive and printed a bunch of photos of Wyatt’s toys to add to the sleeves.

I still had a lot of spaces to fill after I did that, so I hopped onto Flickr and did some searches for things that Wyatt is into. I was careful to pay attention to the Creative Commons licenses assigned to the photos as I was doing this. Here you see a bulldozer and a tiger. I also pulled pictures of: cats, fire engines, diggers, trains, dump trucks, toy Thomas trains, a polar bear and a zebra.

There were a few more gaps left at that point, so I supplemented with some downloads on the Curious George and Dora websites.

Overall, the books was a success. I ended up pulling it out on the plane going down to Orange County and it worked very well to keep Wyatt occupied. (It didn’t work so well at Disneyland, but that’s another story for another day.) The pictures of his toys were especially well received, so I’ll probably make a point of photographing some of his favorites (his Mee-Mee and Polar Bear for example) and swapping them out. Which brings me to another nice feature of this book. Because it’s just a bunch of photo sleeves, I can put new photos in whenever I like. This will allow me to keep it interesting and current for him as his interests change. It’s also nice that I don’t have to worry about some of the photos getting damaged because I can just put new ones in whenever I like.