It seems like my kids have an ever increasing capacity for living in lalaland. They feed off each other and the make believe fun is so awesome to behold. Truth be told, I kinda like joining in when I'm not going to cramp their style.
It's pretty fun to help them start off with a few props that are sitting around the house and watch as they quickly get carried away and lost in the make believe. All the pirate-superhero-mermaid
swords and hats we made for my four year old's birthday party were still in use months later and the
rocket ship is still going strong after nearly three months of constant preschooler abuse. It's well worth the effort to be a facilitator for make believe I have found.
An easy one for my youngest daughter, who is newly potty trained and loving her superiority over the diaper wearers, was to give her the empty Kandoo butt wipe box (we used one box and a refil as a bit of a trial before I figured they weren't really needed) to use as a potty for her doll. Now that she is wise in the ways of the bowels, she can have fun imparting her knowledge to her dollies and high fiving them when they c**p in the can.
Last week we the peddle barbie corvette that we got for $5 in a yard sale last spring was pronounced dead, following a collision that rendered it's stearing unfixable without welding gear. On the weekend the kids got to play at being mechanics in the sun while the grown ups were taking apart other scavenged electronics for parts for future projects. They spent a good two to three hours unscrewing all the screws on it, some whilst lying on a skate board under the car like the real mechanics do. Later that evening my four year old daughter says to us "after dinner, can we go outside and screw again?" You try not laughing. FAIL.
Monday heralded an experiment in home dentistry. Both the kids are interested in the dentist after a trip a couple of months ago, the younger one was quite nervous about the genuine dentist's trip though, so I thought maybe some playing at being dentists with her sister would make it less scary. Turns out a four year old's booster seat makes a great make believe dentist's chair, and an old blue dress shirt of mine that had already been used to be a nurse worked out as the costume. They decided they needed goggles too. We got a cup of water and a bowl to spit the rinse in and they brushed each other's teeth and counted each other's teeth and my older daughter took great pleasure in telling my younger daughter all about how to look after her teeth.
The best ones are when you get to just sit back and watch the crazy unfold. This month the kids have been obsessed with volcanos (we did the classic volcano science experiment a while back). They have on several ocassions lately, declared there to be "a volcano in twenty minutes!" and then crammed all the stuff from their bedroom into the home made space rocket to escape/evacuate. The most recent volcano wasn't nearly so troublesome because aparently "the aliens say that we can stay with them for a while". One of the previous volcano evacuations was hampered by someone being stuck in a tree full of mice (I swear this is the stuff I deal with daily and I am going to be so sad when it inevitably starts to subside with age). In the mean time, we need volcano insurance.
What make believe fun do your kids go for?
I marked a load of dots in the tops of the boxes and the kids used the rocks to hammer the nails in on the dots, then they pulled the nails out and used the holes as a guide to start screwing the wood screws in. Both my girls have used screwdrivers a lot recently with different projects and the lads loved this activity too. They all got the clockwise to screw in and anticlockwise to screw out thing by the end. 
They stuck at this with minimal interference from me for what must have been approaching two hours. My job seemed to be merely fetching more nails and screws. They were so into it that we ran out of screws and I had to resort to giving them a box of white plastic coated hooks that had screw ends to keep going with.
As usual, the combination of being allowed to play with two things that they usually aren't (rocks and nails) meant that this was a very popular activity. I think they inadvertently got a lot of skills from this though and it was free because we had all the stuff lurking in the garage. Yay free! I'm just going to pile the boxes in the garage and if they ask to do it again tomorrow or next week then I'll turn the boxes upside down and give them some smaller screws and nails and see how they do with something a little more fiddly. Mwah ha ha!
I intend to make scratch mits from the wee feet bits to go with a hat and the leg warmers. These are probably all going to be a bit too small for my freind's baby, or will only fit her for a few weeks at most (although she is on the dinky side), but my friend also has a little girl who is almost three and adores baby dolls, so they will make a nice matching ensemble for her baby to wear next to her little sister wearing the genuine Babylegs.
Got lots more tights to make other little matching outfits and some of the tights are 24 months, so they might work out larger. I need to get some elastic to finish the scratch mits for the dollies though.
It's a good way to teach colour mixing too. Letting them create blobs of colour next to each other and then using the brush to mix them on the floor.
We are super classy here and my kids love to splash about and paint each other with watercolour blocks in an under the bed storage box. I did briefly entertain the idea of getting an inflatable paddling pool until I realised that it would last approximately five minutes after the two hours that I would spend inflating it, and they are more than happy with the storage boxes anyway (we actually had eight kids playing in and around two of these boxes full of water today with the chalk).
I've said before that my kids just love to have pockets on their clothes. There are just too many things, small things of great importance that must be stashed about oneself you see. There has to be a place to keep the polly pocket hat while you are rollerskating and a place to hide the last candy corn from your sister and a way to make sure your mum is always accidentally laundering crayons and tissues and small rocks and beads and rubber butterflies and real snails. Urgh, anyway...
House rule, number four thousand and eighty two: The pants pocket can only be worn by the original owner of the pants.
Here's the little lady looking rather pleased with her shorts. She's a tall 4T and I reckon these shorts would be fine up to about 6T if you made the waist band a bit looser. The author at Dollar Store crafts mentioned that her shorts turned out a little too small for her two year old and were more suited to a one year old or infant, but I think these tea towels were bigger. They measured 20 inches wide by 26 inches long.
Now I have to get the wee lass (3 years old) to choose the colour she wants her shorts to be out of the other three matching dollar store tea towels I picked up. I think I'll also sew some cutey applique designs on one of the legs of each pair when I'm done making them too. I love how cheap it's turning out to be to get a nice stash of summer cotton skirts and shorts ready!
My three year old made lots of cyclops worm beasts and skewered them like coctail sausages and my four year old made a hunormous splatty two dimensional dude with lots of eyes and what looks like a rare skin complaint.
I helped them make other monsters that they took apart and reassembled in various weird and wonderful ways. 
All in all it was rather fun and I could shove it all in a tupperware container for us to play with again another time. Maybe when they are older we can have some fun doing real claymation!
