The Annotated Ankle Biter

A couple of years ago, I got a really cute play tent made by Bazoongi for my daughter’s birthday. The kids loved playing with it, and I was wishing I could use it this year for the kids to play in at her birthday party. Unfortunately, leaving the tent out in the sun destroyed the material. It looked like a perforated, papery sort of material, similar to tea bags but much thicker. When I picked up the tent to move it, my hands were covered in a fine dust from the material disintegrating. I threw out the tent cover, but kept the tent poles thinking I’d make a new cover for it.

That was two years ago, but I still have the tent poles. I just did a search on the internet to see if there are any cute ideas for making play tents, and I stumbled on this blog article for making a canvas tepee style tent without any sewing. It looks like a fun project. The author has the kids decorate the tent with craft paint. My tent is shaped like a house, so I don’t know if using grommets and ties instead of sewing will work for me, but I like the idea of the craft so much, I wanted to post a link to it.

Looking a bit more, I saw an article called “Princess Tent for Zoe” which describes making a house-shaped tent. I already have my frame, but making a frame out of PVC doesn’t look that complicated. I can use the help in measuring the frame to make a pattern for my tent and sewing it together.

Sometimes I really wonder at the workings of the toddler’s mind.

When my daughter was on the high side of two and a half, she was testing boundaries, and that made sense. But having someone who can barely see over the table running a daily science experiment on pushing my buttons was no more pleasant than it sounds even if I can rationalize it.

I have used it to my advantage at times. I’ve noticed that if I ask her if she wants to do something, and she says, “No”, that if I say, “OK”, she gets upset and wants to do it. Although, I’ve noticed that no amount of reverse psychology works on getting her to eat her vegetables—for that, I’m working on a strategy of familiarization and “peer pressure” of watching friends or people/characters she admires eating them—that I learned about from watching a Discovery Health program on the subject.

This was my first attempt at making an Easter Egg Tree. I used pussy willow branches, and I coloured my eggs with an Easter Egg kit that had dye tabs you dissolve in water (and vinegar) instead of food colour. I’m going to try food colour next year because the tabs didn’t dissolve completely. There were little lumps floating around in the water, and the eggs came out a bit spotted from lumps of dye that settled on them.

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Some of my favourite links for Easter celebration inspiration.

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I was quite optimistic about my daughter’s eating habits when at one year old she was fond of gnawing on pickles, sucking the salad dressing off of my caesar salad, and slurping down her carrot soup. She still likes some healthy food, but somewhere between 1 and 2, she stopped eating any vegetables except tomato sauce.

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