During the summer, our family went on a road trip that included a three day rock concert. During that trip, I realized that coloring and activity books weren’t going to be enough to keep a four-year old occupied between sets and during performances he wasn’t the least bit interested in.

So, at the nearest mall, I found a box of “Edushape Magic Shapes” magnetic foam blocks for about $20. (You can get them at Amazon.com for that price here.)

They were a huge hit with both David and his 15-year old brother, who spent hours together making castles, houses, animals, trains and other unidentifiable creatures.

Their primary complaint was that 54 pieces wasn’t enough. I didn’t want to buy another box, though, for about the same reason. 54 shapes for $20 just seemed a little overpriced.

So I was overjoyed when I found this 108 piece set of Magnetic Foam Blocks for only 12.95. The blocks are EXACTLY the same size as the Edushape kit, and the two sets fit together perfectly.

The building board in the cheaper set is both larger and sturdier than the Edushape set too. The only down side to the cheap set is that it doesn’t come with a handy carrying case/box.

Still, for under $13, it is a fantastic camping and travelling toy that doesn’t take up much room and can entertain kids for hours. A great deal!

The really cool thing about iTunes is that you can create soundtracks for the various fascinations in your life fairly quickly. I’ve been busy compiling the pirate playlist for David today, since he’s been running around since Christmas morning dressed like a pirate. Here’s how it stands so far:

• Jack was Every Inch a Sailor (Sharon, Lois & Bram)
• There’s a Hole in the Bottom of the Sea (Danny Kaye)
• Octopus’ Garden (Ringo Starr)
• Captain Kidd (Great Big Sea)’
• Drunken Sailor (Irish Rovers)
• Pitcairn Island (Captain Tractor)
• I’m Popeye the Sailor Man (Billy Costello)
• Barnacle Bill the Sailor (Bix Beiderbecke)
• Son of a Son of a Sailor (Jimmy Buffett)
• The Last Saskatchewan Pirate (Captain Tractor)

There’s got to be more songs that a pint-sized pirate would enjoy listening to, so I’m open to suggestions.

When David was two and three years old, he loved making necklaces, bracelets and long, meaningless strings with pony beads. Now that he’s 5, he’s ignored the big container of beads for some time.  I had almost forgotten about the container until I found an old paper with a few patterns that could get my boy’s boy to find interesting. Sadly, the instructions for the patterns were impossible to understand, so we just decided to wing it.

We started with a Gecko.

It was actually pretty easy. David did the body on his own, and I helped out with the legs, which we just made on separate small bits of beading string and shoved the excess string into the body beads. An inelegant solution, but it turned out OK.

The trick to the body is to start with your first bead in the middle of a loooong string, then bring each side of the string through the next row, crossing back and forth through every row till you get to the single string of beads that is the tail.

The butterfly was a bit harder.

The wings took at least a half an hour to figure out how to get the string to wrap around when there was only one end. The solution was to string all the beads in a single line, then go back through the beads as they correspond to the rows in the wing.

Tomorrow he’s decided we need to figure out how to make a spider and a frog.

I’ve dug up a few other bug patterns online too, like this bumble bee, this beetle, and this ladybug.

There’s also a few to save up for next halloween, like a ghost and jack o’lantern.

I finally have some hope that we’ll get through that big container full of beads in my lifetime.

I was clearing the file browsing history from my computer when this popped up:

Check out this article from the BBC:

A recent survey of British children revealed that they spend an average of 3.5 hours a day with their parents and 52% say school work dominates family conversations. Perhaps that’s why 31% of those surveyed ranked doing well at school as more important than getting along with their family members.

13% said they never eat together as a family, and one in four do not count their father as immediate family.

I’m not a ‘traditional family values’ type of person, but this seems off kilter to me.

You can read more here.

David and I spent part of the day yesterday assembling Christmas cards for grandparents, uncles and cousins. We bought a few kits from The Oriental Trading Company, but the what really sparked the creativity was paper artist Robert Sabuda’s site, where he offers patterns and plans for a bunch of simple pop-ups, many of which are great for Christmas.

My favorite was the Christmas tree, while David liked the snowflake best. We finally had to stop experimenting when we ran out of cardstock.