Groceries and Stickers

2 things I did with Noah recently brought me back to my childhood.

1. I used to love playing grocery store with empty food boxes on makeshift shelves. I wasn't sure if Noah is too young to enjoy the same thing, but I thought I'd give it a try, since we are always looking for new things to keep us busy during the day (You can only play Play-dough so many times!). I set them up some old food boxes and cartons in our spare room, nothing fancy, but it doesn't take much to satisfy little kids. I gave Noah a big plastic laundry bin to use as a shopping cart and an old wallet with old gift cards, and he went to town. His favorite part was swiping his debit card and putting in his pin number into the computer.

This is a picture of Noah doing his shopping--he's all a blur, going from one item to the next, throwing things into his cart and talking on the cell phone the whole time. He's learned from the best. :)


2. We were playing with some smiley face stickers. Noah likes stickers but his fingers are still so small and his fine motor skills aren't quite there yet, so he has a hard time getting little stickers off the page and getting them to stick in the right places. But today he found a new place for stickers and it was funny enough that he managed to get his little fingers going.

(I made the picture small so as not to frighten anyone...)

It reminded me of a funny story from my childhood. My mom was taking a nap one evening and some of us kids thought it would be funny to stick little happy face stickers on her face while she was knocked out. After her nap she got up and went to the store and kept getting all these smiles from people, and she was just so impressed with how overly friendly and happy everyone was at wal-mart that day. When she got home she realized that she had smiley face stickers all over her face, and maybe that was the explanation for all those smiles. I just love what that says about motherhood--some days you roll off the couch and jump in the car without so much as a glance in the mirror, and for all you know, you could have smiley face stickers (or worse!) plastered to your face. I went ahead and took off the stickers from my face pretty soon after Noah moved on to other activities, because I do have a trip to Wal-mart planned today, and I don't need the extra smiles or attention!