Let's play dress-up!

I apologize for my delay in updating – had some random health and home stuff come up recently!

Most parents of three-year-olds have experienced the dress-up phase.  It’s fun to see their little minds working, and to see them taking on a role – you get to see how someone with very little exposure to the world sees princesses, firemen, pirates.  Also, it takes up about an hour so that Mommy can also grab a cup of coffee, which is a nice change when you rarely get to even pee by yourself.

We’ve tried to fight just getting our daughter “girl” items for dress-up – not because we don’t think those are appropriate, but why force her into a little box that may not fit?  Pink is by far her favorite color, but she also likes using pretend tools, so we want to give her the tools to explore all of her interests.

It all started with a cowboy hat when she was about 2.  She hadn’t really shown any interest in dressing up before then, so my husband and I picked up a foam cowboy hat and some glitter paint at Hobby Lobby one night when we were on a “date” (because don’t all parents end up either grocery shopping or getting stuff for their children on dates?).  The hat was about $5:  LINK.  We brought it home and let her help decorate it – and it’s been a staple of her wardrobe ever since.  Here she is getting into the holiday spirit sometime this past summer:

The hat has held up remarkably well for only $5 of foam.  I can’t say that I’d recommend using glitter paint on it, as about 1/3 has scraped off, but it was a good buy.  I don’t remember there being any other color choices, so this may be pretty limiting if your child does not care for pink.

The next set that Pickle got was a Jake & The Neverland Pirates set that had a spyglass, headband, and treasure map.  (LINK)  It runs about $20. 

The spyglass is sort of annoying as hell, because a whistle blows constantly, and then Captain Hook calls someone a scurvy dog or something, I don’t know.  But I don’t think the batteries ever die.  Regardless of that, it’s a huge hit.  And Pickle has slept in that headband, done pottery painting in it, and so on. 

She loves it, and it’s pretty constantly in use.  We had some visitors recently for a big Thanksgiving party, and she was somewhat loathe to share her Jake set with the other kids, since it’s so special to her.

She was pretty cool sharing her superhero cape and mask.  I can’t find the exact kind we have, but here is a pretty close facsimile:  LINK

As you can see, even fancy ladies holding tea parties can be superheros.  She usually runs around jumping off of stuff when wearing this, so it’s not my personal favorite as I’m pretty sure it’s going to lead to a concussion.  But it was incredibly cheap and has had a lot of use.  It’s sort of satiny – my one complaint would be that the eye mask doesn’t have the greatest eye-hole things, they’re not really big enough to accommodate toddlers and preschoolers running around in this at Mach 5. 

We also love princesses in our house.  Especially princesses who wear pink.  So, when Pickle received this dress as a gift, she was over the moon:  LINK

As you can see, she accessorizes very heavily with this dress, including monster foot slippers.  (She called those her “glass slippers.”)  Anyway – it’s way easier to get on and off than some princess dresses that I’ve seen at Target or the like.  It slips on, and there’s just Velcro on the back to hold it on.  It runs about $20 – so, if you’re not certain that your child will get into the whole frilly dress thing, you may want to start with something a little cheaper (and less Pepto-pink).  But, it pairs incredibly nicely with the little play princess shoes you can get.

Because of that, our wonderful photographer took some great pictures of Pickle for her 3-year photos, I just wish I could find this tutu online:

The last items I want to review can’t really be purchased online, unless you maybe want to email my mother-in-law and see if she still has patterns from 25+ years ago.  She sent us an entire big box of old Halloween costumes from my husband and his four siblings just before Halloween, and that is the best thing ever.  Pickle has been Mickey Mouse, Little Bo Peep, and a boxer:

There are so many great patterns out there for costumes, and it means so much to have something handmade with love.  Pickle’s favorite all-time costume is one my mother-in-law made for her last Christmas when she was obsessed with fairy tales, she hand-made her a Little Red Riding Hood cape:

Anyway – that’s just a small handful of the dress-up items up in here.  We also have clip-on earrings, tiaras, bunny ears, kitty ear barrettes, purses, fedoras, and a never-ending supply of toy jewelry both that we have made and that we’ve purchased.  

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Cindy Lou Who doll - Manhattan Toy GIVEAWAY

Christmas is rapidly approaching (hooray!).  We wanted a way to get Pickle into the spirit, but still to incorporate things she already loves.  Since she’s a huge Dr. Seuss fan (the girl has been able to recite The Cat In the Hat since she was 27 months), we were super-excited to check out the Cindy Lou Who doll from Manhattan Toy.  (Check out Cindy here: LINK)

She only runs $20, but she’s super soft and cuddly – no hard edges to poke either me or my preschooler in the ear at 3 a.m., which is a pretty big plus in my book.  It also makes her age-appropriate for smaller kids, as well.  She’s about 15 inches tall, so she’s also a good size – fits in play cribs and car seats and such. 

When we opened the box and I showed her to Pickle, it’s probably an understatement to say she was excited.  Please forgive the graininess of these photos:

That would be Little A dancing around the room with and hugging Cindy Lou Who. 

That was from about a month and a half ago, and she’s still obsessed.  Here’s a photo from last week – she still sleeps with her every night:

She hadn’t been familiar with the story of the Grinch last Christmas (I’d felt like maybe she was a little too young) – but she is ALL OVER this story this year.  She loves having Cindy Lou Who (who she sometimes accidentally calls “Lolly Lou”) help all of her other stuffed animals stop being grinches.  The doll is very durable, so even all of this abuse hasn’t hurt her a bit!

So…  we want to give you a chance to grab one before the Christmas rush!  Please make a separate comment below if you’ve done each of the following things:

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You can enter now through next Tuesday, November 19 at 9 p.m. CST.  We will announce a winner after that time, so please check back next Tuesday!

Crayola Color Wonder Markers and Paper

Having a small child is a little bit like trying to control a puppy.  They want to be in the middle of everything, putting their mark on everything, but neither their aim nor grace is very advanced at first.

Pickle really likes art projects.  I love celebrating that, I love encouraging her creativity and talents!  Since she turned about 2, however, she really hasn’t been as interested in the colored pencils and crayons that are so traditionally popular with toddlers/preschoolers.  (The bonus about these two items is that they are unlikely to permanently mark on walls and tables.)  Instead, she wanted to go straight to markers all of the time.  And she’s overall good about understanding where she should and shouldn’t draw, and I watch her, but there are sometimes when a hidden marker gets found while Mama is in doing laundry or something, and 3-year-olds are naturally curious (again like puppies).

There are washable markers on the market, but this is somewhat of a qualified name, in my opinion.  We found this out last night at Halloween when we used a washable black marker to make her nose black for trick-or-treating – three baby wipes, some cold cream, and some Irish Spring later, and she still has a ghost of a black puppy nose.  (Sorta hoping that goes away before family photos this weekend!) 

We found some Crayola Color Wonder markers and “magic” paper – better yet, it was princesses, so the baby girl was on board (LINK).  They ran about $10 for a little pack:

The premise behind these is that the markers themselves are actually clear – while I wouldn’t let a child color on an heirloom with it or anything, it lives up to this claim.  They only make colors when used on the magic Color Wonder paper.  This idea is sort of genius – it allows the child to express their creativity without drawing all over a lampshade.  Win-win, right?

Well, sort of.  The main problem with these is that the chemical reaction between the marker and paper takes a few seconds – so, the child thinks the marker is not working, and presses harder and/or scribbles all over.  Anyone who has had to take 15 seconds to peel a banana for an impatient toddler knows that this few seconds is key in their world.  By the time the colored area shows up, they’ve decided that the marker isn’t working, and gives up.

There have been a few times we’ve played with these when the Pickle has been more patient.  But the other issue with these (besides the smell, which I won’t address) is that the colors are really, really muted.  Vibrant, accurate colors are sort of Crayola’s thing, so this is also a little disappointing to the little ones. 

Overall, we’ve gotten some use out of these, but we have to catch Pickle on a day when she’s patient.  If your child tends to this by nature, these might be a good fit.  If not, I’d maybe just take your chances with washable markers.

Bottle brushes

I know I went into great detail in my post about the microwave sterilizer, but I’m sort of a germ nut.  So, here’s how my process sort of went for cleaning bottles and nipples:

1    1.  First use a sponge brush on the bottles and nipples to clean them out.

      2.  Wash in dishwasher (use sterilize cycle, if possible).

      3.  Sterilize items in the microwave sterilizer.

      4.  When possible, allow items to dry inside of the microwave sterilizer or on the drying rack, rather than reintroducing germs by drying with a towel or paper towel.

The initial washing with the sponge brush was because breast milk separates when it sits (either at room temperature or in the fridge).  

Ideally, you can mix all of this fatty thick layer back in with the breast milk before feeding it to a baby, but there are times when there are some milk fat hangers-on that stay on the side of the bottle.  If they’ve been there all day (if, say, daycare didn’t get it out of there when they gave your child a bottle at 9 a.m., and it’s now 5 p.m. when you’re cleaning it), this doesn’t always rinse out all that well with just water – which is where the sponge brush comes in.

Originally we tried one of the really general, cheap sponge brushes that you can get – we used a Munchkin, runs about $3.80 at Target (LINK):

The problem with this is that it has bristles.  Bristles work great on something like, say, a griddle – you can easily access all areas on a griddle with your hand, everything that is on there really requires a lot of elbow grease to remove, and it’s okay if you leave some residue, as it will wash off easily if you put it in the dishwasher (or wash it in the sink).  A bottle isn’t really the same at all, in my opinion – even with my tiny little-kid-sized hands, I can’t get my hands all of the way into most bottles on the market, especially not while holding a rag or brush.  The creamy milk fat that gets stuck in there is gunky and slimy enough that it always seemed to me like the individual bristles of a brush would get most of it, but not all (unless I sat there and spun it around for 5 minutes straight).  I did not feel like it was a good idea to leave any of that residue inside of the bottle, because the sprayer jets in a dishwasher (see step 2) don’t usually spray at just the right angle to get inside of a bottle and clean the entire circumference. 

So, I scrapped the brush with bristles.  Since it was less than $4, I didn’t mind just keeping it as a backup, or to use on wine glasses (were we to ever drink or have people over who didn’t need to use sippy cups).  I did some research, and found this brush by Born Free (LINK):  

It’s a sponge wrapped around another sponge.  Since there are no individual bristles, this just swept the inside of the bottle as if I were able to get my hands down in there to clean it by hand with a rag.  Since it’s one contiguous piece, it grabs up all of the milk cream.  Rinse the sponge between bottles, and you can easily and quickly clean out several bottles’ worth in just a few seconds. 

If we had fed Pickle spaghetti sauce or something in her bottle, I think the bristle brush would have been more useful.  But since the milk cream is so filmy and slick, the sponge brush was a much, much better purchase, in my opinion.

Diaper Genie

As I mentioned previously, we did not cloth diaper with Pickle (other than a short-lived attempt at gDiapers).  I’d like to investigate it further with future children, but we did disposables the last time.

Hence…  we had to have somewhere to put those little chipmunk-sized stinkbombs that kept reproducing every few hours.  I’d had a lot of friends recommend the Diaper Genie (LINK), and I understood the principle behind it, so we went with it.

So, the theory behind a Diaper Genie is that it’s this thin thing, inside which there are liners.  You push a diaper down the top of it into the base, and the combination of the puckered top and the lid are supposed to contain the stink.  You keep pushing diapers into this long worm-shaped plastic bags until it’s either too full to shove anymore into it OR your partner refuses to change it, but is instead just setting dirty diapers on top of the Diaper Genie.  (In our house, we took turns playing that passive-aggressive game to get out of changing the bag.)  You remove the top, pull out the long snakey-looking plastic bag of dirty diapers, pull out the next one and get it all set up to receive your child’s next batch of poop- or pee-soiled undergarments, and then you figure out a way to get a four-foot-long bag of diapers into your regular trash bag.

As you could maybe guess from the above description, this system has some flaws.  First of all, let’s think about a bratwurst (I’m from the Midwest, that’s a thing here – if you don’t know what one is, think of a hot dog).  When a bratwurst is cooked too long and it expands too much, the sides burst.  Sort of the same principle with an overstuffed Diaper Genie bag – the sides can blow out.  This can even happen if it’s not overstuffed.  Then you just have a bedroom/laundry room/whatever with dirty, smelly diapers all over the floor.  This inevitably happens at 3 a.m., when you are least prepared to clean up 50 dirty diapers that have just rolled under the bed.  And of course some of them had blowouts on them, because you’re dealing with little babies.  So now that’s on your carpet or hardwood. 

Also, Diaper Genie knows what’s up.  They’re the most recognized diaper pail system out there, so they know that they can charge about $14 for a two-pack of pail liner things.  And there’s a fair number of bags in each one… but there are also a fair number of diapers used each day, so you’re going through them more rapidly than you would guess.  It’s a pretty sweet deal for Diaper Genie – I mean, how much can production costs actually be to snake together some tiny, skinny garbage bags and put them in a cardboard container?  But they’re smart enough to shape the insert so that you can’t really use anything else in there.

The good thing about the Diaper Genie is honestly that it does a good job at containing the smell from invading your room, and it’s an efficient way to contain that smell for a few days at a time while you wait for the bag to fill.  But, if we get pregnant again, I think we’ll likely look at another option as far as diaper disposal.  There are systems that can just use regular old trash bags – or else we also have room in our garage for just another regular old garbage pail that we could just use for dirty diapers.  I think either of those would be more efficient, time-saving systems.

Dollar Tree

This isn’t really so much about a single item, as a store.  The Dollar Tree, to be exact.  It’s a little more true to its name than Dollar General – I honestly don’t know of many items in there that are actually more than $1.  This works sorta great with kids.  I mean, you don’t really feel bad about getting them three items when it’s only going to be $3 total. 

At Pickle’s preschool/daycare, all of the kids usually bring a treat and a little something for all of the other kids on their birthday.  When there are 12 to 16 kids in the class, that can add up pretty quickly.  Usually the kids get a kazoo or some sidewalk chalk or something, and then the treats have to be pre-packaged, nut-free (no children in her class have dairy or gluten allergies, so we’re pretty safe there).  The week of her birthday, the class had been studying insects and their habitats – so, Pickle and I went to the Dollar Tree, where they had butterfly nets in an assortment of colors for $1 each.  

We got one for each child, and then found some pudding with cookies in it (we figured something ridiculously unhealthy was okay for one day) – there were four of them in each $1 pack.  So, we ended up doing her entire birthday for 14 kids and two teachers for around $20.  The best part was that the gifts were a huge hit – we walked in to pick up Pickle that night, and the director of the school stopped us to inform us that our gift idea had been so popular on that rainy day that the kids were running all over the classroom “catching butterflies” with them as part of their learning curriculum.  Thanks for making us look like rock stars, Dollar Tree!

We also just sometimes go in when the Pickle needs some new craft items, or when she has a few dollars and wants to get a special treat.  For example, we went this past weekend, and I told her that she could get any three items she wanted.  It was the best game in the world to her – she looked at the giant fake Halloween spiders and giggled when she thought about scaring Daddy with them.  She looked at the Christmas items, and the crafts.  She thought about all of the fun things she could paint and decorate.  We obviously ended up in the toy aisle.  She came home with a bouquet of fake flowers (for when she pretends to be Little Red Riding Hood), some new markers, and a 24-piece puzzle of Little Red Riding Hood and the Big Bad Wolf (they had many other ones, too – Disney characters, Jack and the Beanstalk, etc.).  So, when I look at it from a developmental standpoint – she got something to aid her in pretend play, something to aid in creativity and hand/eye coordination, and something to help improve her logic and problem-solving skills.  That’s not a bad haul for $3 plus tax, and it kept us busy for the majority of the day on Sunday. 

I’m not going to say I’d necessarily get, like, an heirloom piece or anything there, as these items are probably going to break faster than toys you get elsewhere – but it’s a great, inexpensive way to fill a bag of new “presents” to take on a long car ride, or pad your craft stock, or so on.  It’s worth the time to go!