Activity Bags: Gumdrop Construction

Last week (and a little bit) I posted about some Activity Bags I'd made up during a day off to help Mr E entertain Mini-M, and assuage a little bit of my part-time parent guilt. Really, I should have been a Catholic, based on how guilty I feel about most things in life!

The bags have been a hit with Mini-M - primarily I think, because she seems to view them a little bit like presents - they are there to be unwrapped. Some of them have provided plenty of lasting entertainment - enough for me to join in the fun at the weekend, or after work.

Step 1 - tip out ALL the sweets

If fact, we had the Gumdrop Construction set up on the storage box in our bedroom for a good four or five days. Mini-M was very concerned we might be playing with it after she went to bed - she didn't want to miss out on the fun. But we convinced her that our evenings were generally filled with dish washing, picking up the chaos of the day distributed around the house and generally vegetating on the sofa, rather than building elaborate wine gum towers...

"Mummy build an animal house"... "Mummy that's not a house it's a tent"

This activity came from Tinkerlab Grumdrop Sculptures. I used miniature wine gums because I couldn't find the American hard gums I was looking for - which ironically would have been softer! Similarly, possibly Poundland cocktail sticks were a little more splintery than ideal... but since we had 5 packs (don't ask me why they are sold as 6-packs. Seriously, who needs a 6 pack of 100 cocktail sticks. Our 600 will be lasting us pretty much indefinitely - I hadn't realised they were a once in a lifetime purchase!)

House. Definitely house. Clearly 5 years of a Civil Engineering degree put to good use...

And how did we persuade Mini-M not to just eat all the sweets? Mr E concocted an elaborate back story (!) that the sweets were really out of date, which is why we were playing with them, but that meant they weren't good for eating and would taste yucky. Hence Mini-M spent a lot of time sniffing them to see if they smelled funny. Apparently the green ones did.

Serious sweetie smelling. Number of sweets smelled - LOTS but number eaten - none :-)

Almost as much playing time was dedicated to a weird sweet shop / hairdressing crossover activity, whereby Mini-M gave both Mr E and me "rockstar hair" by balancing as many sweets as she could on our heads, whilst we were seated on the floor with a tea towel over her shoulders, and she was brandishing a comb and an imaginary hairdryer. Somewhat bizarre, but definitely creative play!