Inspired By Junk Mail

Grace and Jack love getting the mail from the mailbox in the afternoons. Last Friday, they both ran in the house, dumped most of the mail on the table and then ran into the playroom with the latest catalog from Oriental Trading Company. If any of you receive this magazine, you'll know that there are dozens and dozens of projects that you can mail order and put together at home.

What Grace was looking for was inspiration. I didn't get a "Hey Mom! Can we get this?". Instead she asked all day if she could do a "project" with me. I had no idea that the magazine was serving as inspiration for the project. It was one of those Mom days where extracurricular activities just didn't have a space, so she smartly defaulted to Dad that evening, and then informed him that she wanted to make a gingerbread house like the picture she saw.

Dad (awesome Dad that he is) spent the next hour sitting at the table with Grace as they planned out a cardboard gingerbread house. In an hours time, they had built an outstanding piece of work decorated with foam pieces and construction paper!!! It was really a work of art! This weekend she was also inspired by two more project photos, setting to work on a bat made out of cut out handprints and a Thanksgiving headdress.

What I'm most impressed with is her determination to just set to work and make it from what she has on hand. I can remember as a kid being inspired to make things from a Make and Do Childcraft book, but I'm not sure I ever took the initiative that Grace did from a magazine.