Looped

When my mom was watching the girls for me last month during her visit, she attempted to help the girls make their own candy necklaces out of Fruit Loops cereal.  However, the girls were more interested in consumption than creation, so the activity was put on hold.  Yesterday, Susie spotted a picture in a parenting magazine of a girl wearing a candy necklace and she told me she wanted to make one.  So today I broke out the Fruit Loops and tried again.  The craft was actually a great way to work with them on their manual dexterity as well as impulse control and delayed gratification (I almost sound like I know what I’m doing!  In the moment, it was more like a: “Can their stubby little fingers figure this out before they give into the temptation and eat everything and end up with nothing but a piece of string?”).

I was impressed that it didn’t take long before they were threading the cereal without any assistance, and that they even refrained from sampling the cereal…that is, until I gave Becky permission to eat a broken Fruit Loop.  Once she got a taste, it was more like a thread-one-eat-one process.

The finished product was very cute, and Becky immediately decided that the necklace was better used as a snack than a decorative item.

Susie, on the other hand, was very pleased with her hard work, and wanted to show it off to the world.  Here are her proud poses:

Her necklace actually remained untouched for several hours, because she urgently wanted to show its entirety to her Grammie and Grandpa.  Once we called them and “showed” Grandpa the necklace via iPhone Facetime, it was gone in thirty seconds!  

I was trying to brainstorm a more healthy version of this necklace activity that I could do with the girls next time, but then I decided that would take the fun out of it.  Who wants to wear vegetables around their neck?  And what vegetable, or fruit or anything wholesome for that matter, comes in a large, convenient circle anyway? Sugar high, here we come!